“I wish I could be there,” she says in a sympathetic tone. She’s got the weirdest accent—Southern and phonetically proper, all at once—and something about it always reminds me of Scarlett O’Hara.
“It’s okay. I know you can’t be, and it’s no biggie.”
Jamie’s a publicist for country music stars, and one of her mouthiest, most trouble-making clients is filming an interview with CMT in two hours.
“It’ll either go well or it won’t. I’m trying to prepare for either way.” I sound a lot more chilled out than I feel.
“Keep me posted. I’ll say a prayer,” she says.
“Thanks.”
I roll into the Sevier County Courthouse parking lot five minutes late, but still take the time to reapply my red lipstick before exiting the car. It’s an attitude thing. Once I feel as if my ’tude is cemented safely in place, I allow my eyes to linger on the left side of my mouth. I try to see myself the way they’ll see me. The way I saw me the first day I woke up in the ICU.
I can’t, though. Not after this long. I just look like me, and I know that’s probably a blessing: that my eyes can’t see my face with horror.
I lift my chin and practice what I used to call the duck face, back when I modeled. Eyes slightly wide, lips pressed into a pout so subtle there’s no way anyone would actually call it that. The look is requested so often by photographers in shoots because it could be anything: pouty, sexy, innocent.
The look makes me feel pouty and hopefully appear innocent—even slightly victimized—so I hold it as I walk briskly past the Dolly Parton statue in front of the building and up the steps.
I hold my shoulders up straight and even use my model walk as I make my way through the crowd and to the elevator banks.
“Shit.”
There’s a sheet of paper taped to the closed doors.
“OUT OF ORDER. PLEASE USE STAIRS.”
I inhale deeply, keeping my face neutral even though I want to scream. There are people all around me, people I believe are staring at me. Probably because they saw my picture in that newspaper article that ran a little while ago. Judgy people. The Southeastern United States may be beautiful and friendly, too, but people here are judgier than Saint Peter.
Shit. I’m late and now I have to take the stairs.
My mood plummets further when I see how freaking packed the stairwell is. Some guy huffs and puffs behind me, and I swear I feel his greedy eyes on my ass. Kind of makes me want to turn around and snarile at him.
As I’m nearing the door that opens onto the third floor, a white-haired woman lunges out in front of me to get the door.
“Thank you.” I smile slightly before stepping through.
“Anything for you, dear. You know, my mother’s mother worked in a traveling circus. Dancing bears.”
It’s a good thing the last few years have trained me not to smile—that would be snarile: the one-of-a-kind smile + snarl my paralyzed mouth makes when I try to smile—spontaneously because the way she lifts her brows with circus bear pride makes me want to laugh. Some people are just too clueless.
“Oh?” I say.
Before she can answer, we’re crossing a hall and entering a set of open doors, moving into a room that may actually qualify as hell. Hell is other people. This many of them is probably the central zone in the Ninth Circle of Hell, which as you may know happens to be a freezing place. Shudder. (I have a special hatred of cold places).
At the far end of the awful, sweat-scented, sardine can known as the county commission meeting room, a short, black-haired girl catches my eye and waves. It’s Jenny Lin from the Gatlinburg TV news station. I stretch my mouth open a little—my substitute smile—and hold my hand up in what I hope is a friendly wave.
Jenny is nice. She’s on a short list of semi-strangers that, under normal conditions, I’d give my snarile to willingly; unfortunately, this room is just too crowded for such a display.
Besides, I need to save the snarile for effect.
My stomach rolls.
I stand against the whitewashed, cement-block wall at the back of the room as the county commissioners seated at two long desks work their way through the minutes, until at last they start to talk about the zoning subcommittee’s recommendation to re-zone Mr. Frank Haywood’s property on Blue Moon Road.
My heart jackhammers as the commissioners start thumbing through their notes on this subject. One of them, Nancy Stein, the bitchy owner of a luxury car dealership, gives the crowd a recap.
“Mr. Haywood wants his residential property re-zoned so he can sell it to a developer who would make the home—quite a large home, I believe it is—into a bed and breakfast. That developer, as it happens, is here tonight,” the councilwoman says in her crisp, schoolteacher voice. “Her name is Ms. Carolina Burns. From Nashville.”