Sidecar Read online

  Bywater Books

  Copyright © 2012 and 2016 Ann McMan

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  Bywater Books First Edition: July 2016

  Sidecar was originally published by Beddazzled Ink, LLC Fairfield, CA in 2012.

  Cover design by TreeHouse Studio

  Bywater Books

  PO Box 3671

  Ann Arbor, MI 48106-3671

  www.bywaterbooks.com

  ISBN: 978-1-61294-088-5 Ebook

  For SlumDog, who taught me to recognize

  where a story really begins.

  FOREWORD

  “A hallucinogenic potato perfume, cassis, ripe berries, and acrid chocolate overtones are coalesced in this tough and chewy Muscadine from Beaver Glacier Estates—not,” David said, as he poured the remaining wine down the drain with a flourish.

  Maddie wiped her tongue with a wet paper towel. “What possessed you to set up a tasting with a wine rep from Southern Indiana?”

  David sighed dramatically. “He said his wines were award winning.”

  Maddie raised an eyebrow. “Did you bother to ask if the awards were presented at a 4-H competition?”

  Thus begins this feisty book of shorts by author, Ann McMan.

  Well, not really.

  But it could, and few loyal readers would be surprised. Come to think of it, no one who knows Ann McMan would be surprised. You see, contrary to chat room rumors, and speculation by puritanical reviewers on amazon.com, Ann isn’t a foul-mouthed boozy lush—and she wasn’t raised in the back room of the Hell’s Angels MC Pennsylvania clubhouse.

  The simple fact is that Ann McMan is very much like the women she writes about—razor sharp, intelligent, multi-faceted, funny, antagonistic towards spurious vegetables, and a little OCD. She has a soft spot for sweet dogs, adores opera, appreciates a well-made Cosmo, cooks up a mean batch of chicken and biscuits, and has a particular affinity for the F-Bomb. Sometimes she “gets that way she gets,” and other times she doesn’t. On very rare occasions, she channels Mrs. Trefoile in Die! Die! My Darling!

  In all seriousness though, Ann McMan is a talented author with a special gift for timing and dialogue. She is a keen observer of the world around her, and excels at the sport of paying attention in the midst of chaos. The men and women who populate the landscapes of her books and stories are not only well rounded and complex, but familiar and psychologically believable—a rare and desirable combination in modern literature.

  Oddly, not long after turning the manuscript for Sidecar over to her editor, Ann asked me to read through each of the stories, and to pay particular attention to her protagonists. “Do I keep writing the same characters over and over?” she asked. My first reaction was “Um. . .” Quickly followed by a “Well, maybe.” Then I dodged the lime wedge she threw at me, and offered up a solid and convincing, “No, definitely not,” before threatening to slip okra into her refrigerator if she didn’t quit throwing fruit at me.

  But I digress.

  The real answer, the truthful answer is “Most assuredly not.” While it’s true that Ann’s characters are universally smart, quick-witted, and clever, they each have distinct personalities, diverse perspectives, and skillfully hidden demons. Their voices reflect individual journeys and their divergent countenances color vividly across a wide spectrum. Try as I might, I have a hard time imagining Jericho’s Syd and Maddie eating a slice of lemon chess pie with Evan and Julia from Dust. Likewise, as I consider the cast of leading ladies within the pages of Sidecar, I think not of the similarities, but the differences between each of the women.

  Of course, there’s only one way to find out—you need climb in, get comfortable, and go for a quick ride with each of them. Sidecar gets things rolling with Syd and Maddie in “V1: A Valentine’s Day Odyssey.” Before you know it, you’ll join the best and brightest authors in contemporary lesbian fiction at the year’s biggest literary convention in the hilarious, gasp-provoking, all-new novella, “Bottle Rocket.” From there, you’ll travel coast-to-coast in “Falling from Grace,” and finally you’ll come to the end-of-the-line in the sweet and smart “Nevermore!.”

  Few things in life are certain, but I have absolutely no doubt that Ann McMan’s Sidecar is the perfect vehicle for your journey—equal parts sweet, tart, and smooth.

  Bottoms up!

  Salem West

  Publisher, Bywater Books

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  V1: A Valentine’s Day Odyssey

  Bottle Rocket

  Falling From Grace

  Nevermore!

  V1:

  A VALENTINE’S DAY ODYSSEY

  “Okay. So tell me again how this is supposed to work.”

  “Syd, we’ve been over this about a thousand times.” Maddie was growing exasperated, but was trying hard not to show it.

  “I know—but I just need to be really sure.”

  “Sweetie, I’ve done everything but show you a PowerPoint presentation.” Maddie hesitated. “You really don’t have to do this at all if you’re still this uncomfortable with the idea.”

  “No!” Syd was determined. “I said I’d do this, and I will. I’m just—”

  “A chickenshit?” Maddie volunteered.

  Syd glared at her. “Not helping.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I really don’t think you are.”

  Maddie sighed. This was going from bad to worse in record time.

  She took hold of Syd’s free hand. “No . . . I’m sorry. Honest.”

  Syd eyed her with suspicion.

  “I mean it. If you want to go over everything again, we will. We can stop right now. There’s no rush. We can do this any time. It doesn’t have to be today.”

  Syd looked out the tiny window. Then she sighed and looked back at Maddie.

  “It’s just that it’s such a big step for me.”

  “I know that, sweetheart.”

  “I mean . . . I’ve never done this before, and it’s scary. What if I mess up? What if I can’t make it work? What if I change my mind in the middle of it? What if—”

  “Honey,” Maddie said. “Relax. I promise . . . you won’t mess up. I’ll be right here beside you the whole time. Trust me. We’ve done everything right, and you’re ready for this. You’ll be through it in a flash, and then it’ll be over, and our biggest problem will be how to keep you calmed down until you can do it again.”

  “But what if I can’t pull it out?”

  “Syd . . .”

  “No. I mean it.”

  Maddie sighed and sat back against her seat. “Then I swear on the blonde heads of our unborn children that we’ll take deep breaths, regroup, and try again.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive.”

  Syd sighed.

  Maddie leaned toward her. “C’mon, baby. Let’s go for it.”

  Syd nodded. She closed her eyes and started to extend her hand, but Maddie caught hold of it before it reached its destination.

  “Honey,” she said, giving Syd’s hand a gentle squeeze. “This generally works better if you keep your eyes open.”

  “Oh.” Syd looked embarrassed. “Sorry.”

  Maddie laughed and kissed her hand before relinquishing it.

  Syd reached out again and took hold of the throttle levers. Taking a deep breath, she released her foothold on the brake pedals, and the twin engine Cessna started rolling down the runway.

  That night at dinner, Henry was beside himself with excitement. He hammered Syd with a nonstop barrage of questions—most of them related to when he could learn to fly the airplane, too.

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,
shortstop.” Maddie used her napkin to wipe some gravy off his chin. “And let’s try to keep the peas on the fork, okay?”

  Henry looked down and regarded the sea of tiny green balls that trailed across the napkin on his lap. “I don’t really like peas very much.”

  Maddie leaned toward him until their foreheads touched. “Tough noogies.”

  Henry sighed and looked at Syd.

  Syd shrugged. “Don’t look at me, sport. I don’t really like them either. But you don’t see me dropping them on the floor.”

  “Pete likes them,” he volunteered.

  At the mention of his name, the big yellow dog lifted his head and cast a hopeful glance up at Henry. It hadn’t taken him long to stake his claim to the section of kitchen floor that supported Henry’s chair.

  “Pete’s on a diet,” Maddie cut in. “And that’s beside the point. We don’t deal with food we don’t like by giving it to Pete.”

  Henry looked confused. “But you did last night with your ‘sparagus, when Syd had to go answer the phone.”

  Maddie closed her eyes and took a deep breath. When she dared to open them, Syd was staring back at her with pursed lips and was slowly tapping the edge of her fork against the rim of her plate.

  “Um,” Maddie said. “Asparagus is good for Pete. It has lots of iron and makes his coat shiny.”

  Henry looked unconvinced. “You said it would make him fart.”

  “Henry.” Syd’s jaw dropped, and she touched him on the shoulder. “That’s impolite. We don’t say things like that.”

  Henry looked really confused now. He stared down at his plate. “That’s what she said,” he muttered.

  Syd glowered at Maddie, who sat across the table from her and felt like she’d rather be locked up in a supply closet with an insurance salesman.

  The silence in the kitchen was deafening.

  Then Maddie sighed and picked up her spoon.

  “Here, buddy.” She reached over to Henry’s plate, scooped up a mound of peas, and dumped them onto the floor. “Lemme help you out.”

  Long after Henry had safely been tucked in, Maddie and Syd sat together on their big bed, propped up against a pile of mismatched pillows.

  Maddie was reading an article about the efficacy of the Herpes Zoster Vaccine, and Syd was grading papers. She had been teaching for six months now, and was starting to settle into a comfortable routine. The Jericho Public Library had reopened, but only for three days a week, and Syd was able to assist the board with hiring a part-time branch manager. She continued to help out whenever she could and volunteered her time at least two Saturdays a month.

  And Maddie still worked one weekend a month in the ER at the Wytheville Community Hospital.

  Weekends were harder to orchestrate now, with Henry in the equation. He was like a floating decimal point in their lives. He belonged, but, while his father continued to serve out his tour of duty in Afghanistan, his position remained unfixed. And his presence changed everything.

  Quiet evenings like this one were a rarity, and they were basking in the luxury of having a Saturday night at home together with no other commitments.

  With a yawn, Syd capped her pen and shifted her stack of papers over to a bedside table.

  Maddie glanced at her over the rim of her reading glasses. “You finished?”

  Syd nodded. “For tonight. I’ll finish these up tomorrow.”

  Maddie began to close her journal. “I can put this away, too.”

  “No, that’s okay.” Syd picked up her student pilot’s flight manual. “I wanted to look through this a bit.”

  Maddie gave her a smug look. “You seem a tad more confident than you did earlier today.”

  “Smartass.”

  “Not at all. I just know you.”

  “You think so?”

  “I know so.” Maddie reopened her journal.

  Syd sat chewing the inside of her cheek for a moment. Then she lowered her gaze to the flight manual and thumbed through its pages.

  After a minute or two, Maddie noticed that Syd seemed to be turning more pages than she was reading—loudly.

  She lowered her journal again. “You sure you don’t want me to put this away?”

  Syd faced her with raised eyebrows. “Are you talking to me?”

  Maddie hooked an index finger over the bridge of her glasses and pulled them down her nose. “Is Robert De Niro hiding someplace in this bed? Of course I’m talking to you.”

  “Oh. Sorry. I didn’t think you needed to ask me what I wanted.”

  Maddie sighed. “Could we hit the reboot button, please?”

  “Why? You feel the need to take something back?”

  “That depends.”

  “On?”

  “On whether or not it’ll get you to stop acting like Travis Bickle.”

  Syd smiled at that. “Have you ever even seen a movie that was made in this century?”

  Maddie shrugged. “You got the reference.”

  Syd held up the aircraft manual. “Yes, but I don’t get this one.”

  “Which one?”

  Syd turned the book around so Maddie could see a diagram that illustrated the four-stroke process of an engine’s piston and cylinder cycle.

  “Internal combustion? That’s just basic physics.”

  “Well, maybe it is to you, brainiac. But I don’t get the whole squish, bang, pop, thing.”

  Maddie looked confused. “You mean, suck, squeeze, bang, and blow?”

  “Exactly. There’s nothing . . . intuitive about it.”

  Maddie closed her journal. “Sure there is.”

  Syd sighed. “Maybe it’s just my learning style. I’ve always been better at hands-on instruction.”

  “Honey, there’s really no way to get hands-on instruction in the operation of an internal combustion engine.”

  Syd ran a fingertip down the inside of Maddie’s v-neck t-shirt. “Sure there is. You just have to be creative.”

  Maddie looked down at her hand. “Are we still talking about airplane engines?”

  Syd moved closer. “Do you really care?” She pulled Maddie’s glasses off and tossed them to the bedside table.

  “Um . . . well . . .”

  Syd kissed Maddie’s neck.

  Maddie felt her heart rate shift from idle into full-throttle mode. “I guess not.”

  “So, what were those stages again?” Syd breath was hot against Maddie’s ear. She bit down on her lobe. “Suck?”

  Maddie moaned and wrapped an arm around Syd. “Squeeze.”

  Their lips met.

  “Bang?” Syd muttered against Maddie’s mouth, as she pushed her back against the pillows and crawled on top of her.

  Oh, Jesus. Zero to V1 in ten seconds. Maddie took hold of Syd’s head, which was traveling down her torso at an accelerated rate of speed.

  “Blow, baby,” she gasped, while she could still make intelligible sounds. “Blow.”

  “You have got to be kidding me?” David was incredulous.

  Maddie looked back at him with her characteristic, deadpan expression. “Do I look like I’m kidding?”

  David considered that for a moment as he looked her up and down. “You can’t show up here dressed like that and expect me to give you a serious answer.”

  Maddie looked down at her clothes. She had just finished an eight-hour shift in the Wytheville ER, and had stopped by the inn on her way home. Her blue scrubs were covered with iodine stains—the aftermath of going ten rounds with an anxious four-year-old who had vehemently—and vocally—resisted being the recipient of the nine stitches Maddie was obliged to apply to the gaping head wound the girl had sustained after riding her tricycle down the back steps of her parent’s deck.

  She looked around the completely empty dining room. Pretty typical for early February—which was why they closed the inn for the mid-winter months. She brought her eyes back to David.

  “I apologize for committing the egregious error of not arriving in cocktail attire to sit
here and watch paint dry.”

  “Well, I guess that’s something.” He plucked a piece of lint off his trouser cuff and re-crossed his legs. “Besides, I’m not watching paint dry, thank you very much. I’m just killing time until Chopped comes on.”

  Maddie looked back at him with a blank expression.

  David sighed. “If you weren’t such an unrepentant Philistine, you’d know these things.”

  “Whatever. May we return to my original query, please?”

  “We may . . . but I still think you’ve lost it. She’ll never buy it. And, besides, there’s no way you can pull this off.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence, Davey.”

  He waved a hand toward her. “I’m just trying to help you out, Cinderella.”

  “By undermining my confidence?”

  “No. By helping you face reality.”

  Maddie sat back against her chair. “That’s simply ridiculous. I certainly have the skill set to pull this off.”

  David leaned forward. “Oh really? I have two words for you, Sparky.”

  Maddie lifted her chin.

  “Easy Bake. Not.”

  “That’s three words.”

  He rolled his eyes. “You know what I’m talking about. You damn near burned down the farm with that thing, and, may I add, that oven was only powered by a fucking light bulb. It boggles the mind to think about what kind of damage you could do on Michael’s precious, eight-burner, turbo-powered Bertazzoni.”

  Maddie sighed. “Look. It’s Syd’ birthday, and I want to cook dinner for her.”

  David shook his head. “I don’t get it. I thought you two were doing great.”

  “We are doing great.”

  “Then explain to me why you want to kill her?”

  Maddie exhaled. “I may not have to kill her if I can satisfy my bloodlust by eviscerating your ass. Now, will you help me out or not?”

  “Why are you even asking me for help? It’s Michael you need, not me.”

  “I’ll get around to him, but I need you on board, first.”

  “Yeah . . . on board. Perfect image. Just like the Titanic’s maiden voyage.”