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Chapter Text

The town called Dusk was nestled in a valley in a desert in the middle of True-West U.S.A. Unlike every other small town that had dried up and crept out with the rise of the Interstate, the evasive oasis of Dusk had flourished since the day it was built. Legend went that Dusk was founded by a woman called Rose who ran from home on the night of her wedding. She had fought with the man who was to be her husband and told him, “I’ll walk from dusk to dusk across this desert before I’ll be your wife!” And that is exactly what she did. She set out walking right from the wedding chapel and kept on walking through the night. When her betrothed went out searching for her the next morning, expecting to find her curled up in her wedding dress, worn and weary nearby town somewhere, he found nothing but rocks. Rose kept her word, and never stopped walking from dusk to Dusk. So, when she was finally found sleeping in the valley somehow still looking prim and proper while covered in dust and blood and bug-bites––how convenient that Rose’s daylong journey had brought her to the hidden banks of a flowing river––no one had the heart to make her leave. She and her sweetheart made amends and were wed on the very spot that would become their home, the town called Dusk.

Nearly two-hundred years later, Rose’s many times great-granddaughter truly hoped that history would not see fit to repeat itself. Marianne sat at the gate of San Francisco Airport with her wedding dress not on, but stuffed un-lovingly into the bottom of her duffle bag. Two days earlier she had been engaged to a man she thought was the love of her life. Today she wasn’t. While she had respected the family tradition of giving fights at least twenty-four hours to blow over, her lover’s quarrel did not end in a wedding.

Her life was supposed to be perfect. She flew far away from her small town to attend the perfect school on the perfect coast getting perfect grades in her perfect classes on how to be a perfect bad-ass boss of a perfect CFO. She met the perfect man with perfect hair who was perfectly supportive of her perfect financially prosperous dreams. Were they her dreams, though? Marianne had always been happy to go along with her father’s plan to make her into a business-savvy super-star. However, her father had wanted her to stay close to home, while Marianne wanted to go out into the great-wide-world and get her fill of adventures. That’s what she thought she was doing at school before she met Roland. She started dating the Senator-in-training and all of a sudden he had become her adventure. A rather dull, repetitive, yet unreliable, soul-sapping adventure, as it turned out.

Roland had cheated on her. It had been exactly one week before their wedding day, and she was going to surprise him at his place with breakfast in bed only to find the bed in question already occupied by a woman she had never seen before. In that moment Marianne wanted to scream and hit and break things. All she managed to do was drop the groceries with a thump onto the floor and run out of there as fast as she could. She’d hauled herself up at home the whole day, ignoring Roland’s calls and reevaluating every little thing she’d ever done over the past three years of dating him. She’d been so wild and fun and interesting before she’d met him, and, without her even realizing it, he’d managed to mold her into the perfect politician’s wife. He liked her to like art, but not have a controversial opinion on it. Liked her to look flirty and feminine, but not attract the advances of anyone else. Liked her to appear cosmopolitan and interesting, but never more interesting than him. He was a controlling, lying, manipulative sleaze and she’d let him walk all over her.

She called the wedding off the next morning, packed up her bag, and left. It had been her intention to buy a ticket for the next flight out of the country. She’d managed to do a little traveling, fed a little bit of her wanderlust, before meeting Roland, but there was still so much of the world she longed to see. Singapore––Singapore could be good. Or Scotland. It wasn’t until she got to the airport having made up her mind to hop on the first flight starting with an ’S’ that she remembered her passport had expired last year and oh-so caring fiancé had convinced her that it was a waste of time to renew it when she wasn’t exactly going anywhere.

Marianne was pulled out of her thoughts as an unenthusiastic gate agent droned, “We would like to invite our passengers seated in Zone 1 to please board at this time.” She sighed, stood, and hoisted her bag over her shoulder. Home it was.

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There was no Main Street in the town called Dusk, only a winding road named Primrose Place that ran parallel to the river. If there were bad and good sides of town they met on that road. On the North-East side of Primrose Place, nestled in amongst several yarn shops, two antiquing stores, a bookstore, and the town Coffee Shop––Plum’s on Prim––stood the Lucas family’s iconic flower shop, Light House Bouquets. Legend went that Mrs. Rose LeRoy grew enough flowers along the banks of the river to cause the wind that whistled through the valley to carry the smell of paradise across the mountainous desert. Many a lost traveler claimed that her garden was a beacon of life signaling them through barren strangeness. As such, when Rose passed away her children opened a flower shop in her honor and called it Light House.

On the other, less legendarily cozy side of Primrose Place stood several rough-looking buildings owned, for the most part, by the Kerr family. Years ago, Terrence “Thorn” Kerr had moved from Dundee, Scotland to the town called Dusk, because after ten perfectly happy years of marriage his American wife, Griselda, had developed a strange homesickness for anywhere U.S.A. Once settled into town, the Kerrs opened a bar on Primrose Place called “The Thorny Wall,” and Terrence turned the old auto-shop next door into a boxing gym. After five years of love and laughter in the secluded valley, Griselda became a widow. She and her son, Brian “Bog” Kerr, now owned, in addition to the two businesses Thorn left as his legacy, a new auto-shop, a run-down motel, and a tattoo parlor at which Bog was occasionally an artist. Primrose Place was characterized by a stark contrast between the Kerr’s rusty kingdom and the picturesque small-town scene across the way.

It had been years since Marianne had stepped onto the South-West side of Primrose Place. Not that she was afraid of “the bad side” of any town, of course––she was just wary. During the summers of their childhood, back before they were old enough to help out in the shop, Marianne and her sister Dawn would run around town with Dawn’s best friend, Sunny, and the other neighborhood kids. Those summers they would laugh, screech, and play well into the night, leaving behind the worries of winter, and refusing to acknowledge the creeping approach of autumn responsibilities. One particular summer evening when Marianne was eleven––almost too old to play outside with the rest of the children anymore––the older girl was chasing a slippery Sunny through town. In the excitement of their game, neither hunter nor prey noticed the frantic shouts coming from their fellow rascals as they dashed across Primrose Place. It wasn’t until young Marianne tripped and fell into an oversized tire that she realized she had chased Sunny––who had managed to immediately disappear––into the gymnasium on the rough side of the world she knew.

“Hey, kid, watch it!” A gruff voice had boomed at her as she scrambled to free herself from the tire. “Get that kid out of here!” yelled another. Marianne should’ve run, but she was frozen in fear. This half of Primrose Place woke up at night, and the former garage was full of boxers and trainers taking advantage of the evening breeze. What no doubt looked like a handful of tough men and several wanna-be-gangster adolescents to an adult appeared to be a pack of wild monsters to the dumbstruck child.

“Oh, look, another little girl,” whined a creepy looking guy by the punching bags, “First he lets in Hot Stuff over here, next we’re crawling with idiot kids. This place is going to shit.”

The young woman he had called “Hot Stuff” stopped pounding on her bag––much to the relief of the toothy shorter man holding it for her––and turned her attentions to the offending party. “Shove it up your a––“ She stopped, and looked at the still immobile Marianne. With more force than the annoyed woman probably intended, she barked, “Well, get out of here kid!” Marianne did not need to be told again. She bolted away, leaving the mounting squabble behind her, and made a point of avoiding that side of town through the rest of her youth.

But now Marianne was back home and sitting at her new desk in the office above Light House Bouquets with a perfect view of the scene of her childhood trauma. Today would have been her wedding day. Instead of staring lovingly into the eyes of her husband, however, she was staring out the window at the town she had so desperately tried to get away from. Marianne was supposed to be balancing the books for her father’s shop, but she couldn’t concentrate. It was busy work, designed to keep her mind off of what her father no doubt viewed as “a nervous breakdown.”

As her eyes wandered aimlessly across the street, Marianne caught sight of movement through the open garage-sized door of Kerr’s gym. There were only two men that Marianne could see, and they were sparring. One she did not recognize, but if memory served the taller of the two was Bog Kerr himself. Though Marianne could barely remember seeing him around town growing up, Bog was a hard man to forget. He had striking features, and being that he was facing away from the street at present, the most notable to Marianne were the large tattoos along his shoulders. At a distance, they looked like armor permanently etched onto his body in black ink. She could make out their basic shape––interlocking, scale-like diamonds, the topmost of which came to a pointed end halfway up his neck. Some of the diamonds looked filled in, while some of them held only untouched skin. Thinking about it, they kind of reminded Marianne of a decorated pinecone.

The men stopped sparring and Marianne quickly gained interest in the numbers before her as the tattooed trainer casually cast a glance across the road. Several minutes later her task had started to remind her too much of the financial side of wedding planning, and Marianne’s eyes drifted back up toward the window. The fascinating designs were now covered by a worn, brown leather jacket, and man onto whom they were stained was bidding his boxing mate farewell. Marianne watched as he crouched down in the entry of the gym and skillfully leapt up, using his generous wingspan to catch ahold of the rope above his head and his heavy decent to pull the large door closed. After locking the door to the ground, Bog stalked down the street and ducked into a tattoo parlor that Marianne had never noticed before.

“How you doing?” Marianne started. Dawn was standing in the doorway holding two take-away cups and giving her older sister a concerned look. Breathing out her surprise all Marianne could say was, “Shit! You scared me.”

“Oh, I’m sorry!” Dawn stepped further into the office and held one of the cups out to her sister. “I brought you coffee.”

“Thanks.” The two women sat in silence for a while, sipping their hot drinks and watching the passage of time marked in the stretching shadows cast by office supplies. It would’ve been a thoroughly peaceful moment if not for the tension of unanswered questions building in the air. Marianne broke the silence.

“I can’t talk about it.”

“Not even to me?”

The eldest gave her sister a look of hollow defeat before letting her eyes stray back out the window. As she stared, Marianne remembered a set of broad, marked shoulders.

“Dawn?”

“Yes?” The younger sister asked with hope lighting up her big, blue eyes.

“When did we get a tattoo parlor?”

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Upon his death, Thorn Kerr had left his son, Bog, then thirteen, two weighty inheritances. The first was in the form of properties––the bar, the gym, and a humble stretch of land in central Scotland near Tay Forest. Despite this anchor, Bog had been back to Scotland only once to burry his father, and burry his father was all he had done. The second inheritance was Thorn’s rules for living a full life. Bog’s childhood was peppered with phrases like “The Kerr’s duinne start fights, but they duinne lose them neither,” and “There’s no one way to be a good man, but ye can start by being loyal to yer own,” and, perhaps most surprisingly to those who only perceived the expat’s sharp edges and hot-head, “The world is a work of art, lad, and as long as ye know that ye’ll never be without something beautiful to take in.” Bog felt like his father wanted him to be something great, and that the man had left a legacy that could not be lived up to.

Young Bog had idolized his father. He’d wanted to be everything that Thorn was––smart, fierce, strong, loyal, respected, loved. But in his life, Thorn never tried to shape his son into the mold of himself. As a child, Bog had a natural talent for art and music––he could find rhythm and beauty and magic in everything from cracked sidewalks to rotten stumps. Thorn, who never had much in the way of artistic skill, loved this about his son. At the gym, his office walls were covered in years worth of Bog’s artwork, and at home, neither Griselda nor Thorn ever made a motion to silence the din of their son’s green fingers clawing across the guitar before supper time. Had Thorn lived to see Bog grow up, he would’ve spent every penny he could spare on his son’s artistic education.

But in the month’s following Thorn’s early death, Bog lost his taste for making things. Lost his taste for living. Thorn had put a certain joy and unplaceable ease into his family’s life that Bog had always taken for granted. Without his father there to encourage him to live his own life, Bog defaulted into a miserable echo of what he thought his father’s must’ve been. The boy withdrew. He didn’t play music anymore, didn’t draw with a purpose beyond doodling his school days away. Bog grew up too fast chasing after an image of his father warped by grief, bitterness, and the expectations of the world around him. After scraping his way to a High School diploma, Bog spent his time revitalizing his father’s old businesses, and eventually the young man went from being a small-time boxing trainer to a small-town property mogul. In a way, Bog was right about his father’s “legacy.” Over the course of a decade and a half, he had grown into almost the exact opposite of the man his father had wanted him to be.

Chapter Text

She’d seen that face before, laughing into sheets she’d washed in a bed she’d made again and again. That face whose blissfully unaware smile had been replaced by a look of embarrassed confusion when a strange woman burst through the door of her partner’s bedroom. And now that face and its halo of honey brown hair were across the street catching the first rays of light as the sun rose over the town called Dusk. At least, that’s what it felt like.

Within her first few days of being back in her childhood home, Marianne had made the unfortunate discovery that the grown and growing children of the Janney-Doe family bore a striking resemblance to the woman she had found her ex-fiancé in bed with one week before their wedding. Apparently, Mr. Doe and Dr. Janney were so completely enamored with one another that they went ahead and made seven human-photocopies together.

“Love strikes again,” Marianne had griped to herself upon learning of the couple’s happiness and complete lack of interest in birth control.

One of the older Janney-Doe daughters happened to work the opening shift at Plum’s along the route of Marianne’s morning run. Every morning. Marianne wondered if the girl ever slept. Which made her think of beds. Which made her think, again, of the exact moment her heart tore open. She was far from fond of the Janney-Does.

That said, Marianne was far from fond of anything these days.

It had been three weeks since she’d found Roland and his Janney-Doe doppelgänger in bed together and her father was running out of work, busy or otherwise, for her to do around the shop. He also seemed hell-bent on treating her with the same delicacy as one of the rare orchids in their greenhouse. It was driving her crazy! Holding conversations with his fussing and tutting on the other end sapped away far too much of her energy, and if not for her respect of all the effort Dawn put into keeping all the plants healthy and arrangements gorgeous, Marianne would have broken every vase in the shop by now. Still, even looking at her sister’s big, concerned blue eyes every time they spoke too long sent Marianne into another shame spiral.

She had come back home to run away from her sorrows. Now it felt like those sorrows were running her in circles. Because there she was again, running down Primrose Place, trying not to look at the face of the woman her ex just hadn’t resisted. It was infuriating.

Marianne pulled in sharp, dry breaths as her feet pounded even harder than usual down the decreasingly populated streets. She was so, so angry and her heart just wouldn’t slow down. She was angry at Roland for treating her like an accessory; angry at her father for building her up to be some California powerhouse then acting like she was a broken doll at the first sign of trouble; angry at the Janney-Does for having so many god damn children! But most of all, she was angry at herself for being angry.

Marianne’s cry of frustration bounced around the brownish-red hills and bluish-gray shrubs just past the edge of town. Her run had led her down a trail behind a small neighborhood of single-story, sun-bleached homes that didn’t quite fit in and didn’t quite stand out from their surroundings.

She stopped and stooped over her knees. Her eyes wandered over empty bottles and cigarette butts — evidence of the sneaking late-night excursions of Dusk’s bored and restless youth.

‘Why are people such trash?’ She thought to herself. ‘Why am I such trash?’

The rays of the rising sun started to glint off of thin trails of tears trickling down Marianne’s face. As the sky lightened her sobs deepened until Marianne was sure that anyone within earshot would think she was the ghost of some sad, broken, love-spurned woman haunting the hills.

‘You kind of are,’ she thought to herself.

Marianne hadn’t cried like this when she left Roland’s apartment three weeks ago. If anything, she’d just stared too long at anything she was doing while her eyes slowly leaked. And now she was standing in the hills behind her home town sobbing into the sunrise.

‘What the hell, Lucas?’

She felt her disgust at herself rising up and racking her body with every new wave of tears. She couldn’t stop crying. Disgust, anger, despair — They just flowed in and out and over her as her hot tears dropped into the dust.

‘That’s what you get,’ she thought, ‘For falling in love. For being an absolute idiot. For dating a goddamn head of hair!’ Her sob actually caught in her throat and turned into a strangled laugh at that thought.

The sun was starting to heat up the air around her by the time Marianne realized she’d stopped making any noise. As she straightened up and took in her surroundings, she felt like she was releasing the weight of all the emotions that her tears had carried out of her body. It was a light, not-quite empty kind of feeling that seemed to sharpen the lines of the rocks and brush around her. She wasn’t exactly in the moment, and yet she felt more aware of where she was than she had in weeks. She was almost waxing poetical in her level of self-awareness when her thoughts were interrupted by the very loud and distinct grumbling of her own stomach.

Again, Marianne found herself letting out a halting laugh as she turned down the path and made her way back into Dusk.

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Marianne paused outside the cheery storefront of Plum’s on Prim. She’d gotten it into her head that she would throw her fucks to the wind, march right into the cafe, and order a post-run snack from the girl whose face had been unnerving her since before she’d even seen it. And now she was getting cold feet. Before she could turn on her icy toes to just keep on keeping on past Plum’s, the familiar jangle of a bell stopped her retreat.

“We have menus inside if you wanna come in!” The unnerving girl in question was now smiling directly at Marianne from the doorway of Plum’s. “I don’t normally try to drum up customers like this, but it’s pretty slow this early and you look like you could use help decision-making.”

“Oh! Um, yeah.” Marianne’s ears burned as she walked up to the door.

“Morning! I’m AJ. I don’t know if you remember me, but I was in the same grade as Dawn. We all used to play night games growing up.”

“No kidding!”

AJ plopped a giant iridescent rectangle down on the bar.

“You’re welcome to sit there if you like, or you can take the menu and post up wherever. Until it gets busy you won’t exactly need to shout for me to hear your order across the shop.”

“Thanks.” Marianne awkwardly slid into one of the high-stools and picked up the menu. She was bending the laminated paper around to see the mermaid-scale effect dance around its surface when AJ set a very tall, very full glass of water down in front of her.

“Figured you’d be thirsty after your run. Let me know if you need any ice in that!”

“Thanks! Plum really outdid herself with these menus.”

“Do you like them? That was my idea. I have a cousin who does product development for this office supply company in Huston and I called in a favor to surprise Plum for her birthday last year.”

“Wow! That’s . . .”

“Random as hell?”

“Yeah, but they work.”

“Right?! If there’s a captain of the hollo-sexual club in this town its Plum.”

They both burst into laughter at that. The door jangled open and Marianne returned to looking at the hollo-laminated menu as AJ greeted the new customer.

‘This is fine. You’re fine!’ Marianne thought to herself. ‘She’s nice. And she isn’t her, and he isn’t here, and you’re going to chug your water and get a pastry and you’re going to be fine.’

Marianne wound up being talked into ordering a ‘Just Trust Your Barista’ smoothie and a savory scone that sounded too healthful to taste good, but AJ had pointed it out with such confidence that she just leaned into the decision. Behind the bar, several machines whirred to life like a symphony of chaos under AJ’s hand. Marianne watched as liquid was poured and vegetables were transformed at a pace she could hardly keep up with. Before she knew it, AJ was presenting her with a tall, cool mystery potion and a surprisingly delicious looking pastry.

“Tada! I may have definitely popped in a cheeky splash or two of cold brew for ya,” the barista announced with a wink.

“You’re a saint!” Marianne exclaimed.

“No accolades until you try it! You may find I deserve a loftier title” laughed AJ as she walked away to greet the newest customer. Upon taking the first sip of her smoothie, Marianne was inclined to agree.

By the time Marianne had emptied her glasses, cleaned her plate, and settled her bill, AJ Janey-Doe had started to carve out a distinctly AJ shaped spot in Marianne’s mind. She wasn’t an unfortunately-shaped screen on which to project Marianne’s trauma anymore. She was her own kind, hilarious, three-dimensional person. The next morning she would run by Plum’s and maybe, for a split second before the sadness set in, she’d see the face of a friend.

‘It doesn’t fix everything,’ Marianne thought as she stepped back into the growing heat of Primrose Place, ‘but it’s a nice start.’