Rafferty Street Read online

  Synopsis

  In this final, stand-alone volume of the Morton River Valley Trilogy, Annie Heaphy, beloved hero of Lynch’s classic Toothpick House, has moved to the Valley and reunited with her old crowd. She loves her job driving for a sheltered workshop – until being gay becomes an issue. Valley gays unite to defend her as she dabbles in love with the right, and wrong, women. Readers rave about catching up with their old friends— Lynch’s characters— and about the warm, engaging way she tells the story. Whitney Scott, in Booklist, said, “Lynch portrays a lesbian-gay community of enormous range, strength, and diversity.” In Rafferty Street, Sarah Aldridge called Lynch “…a mature novelist who retains the freshness of a young writer.”

  Rafferty Street

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  Rafferty Street

  © 1998 By Lee Lynch. All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN 13: 978-1-60282-854-4

  This Electronic Book is published by

  Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 249

  Valley Falls, New York 12185

  First Edition: August 2012

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Credits

  Cover Design By Lee Ligon

  “Lee Lynch has given us our most heart-touching stories of lesbian life…”

  Katherine V. Forrest

  “In Rafferty Street, Lee Lynch has created a believable contemporary community… Lynch deftly illustrates the groundswell of homophobia dwelling in this small town when lesbian bus driver Annie Heaphy strives to keep her job amidst sexual misconduct allegations. A novel reflecting a spectrum of current events, Rafferty Street captures the emotional upheaval faced by a working class dyke and the strength engendered by her steadfast friends.”

  Terri de la Pena

  “Lee Lynch is a mature novelist who retains the freshness of outlook of a young writer. Her independent, self-reliant women—cab drivers, bus drivers, short-order cooks, social workers, factory hands—are ever ready to face the challenges that all lesbians meet. They also know the value and consolation of sisterhood.”

  Sarah Aldridge

  Introduction

  I never expected the main character of my first novel, Annie Heaphy in Toothpick House, to so strongly capture the hearts of readers who have described her as a romantic hero. Over the years women enthused about her and asked what she was doing, as if she was an old lover. While I revisited her in short stories, that didn’t seem to be enough. Annie has a new book all her own, Rafferty Street. A lot has changed since Annie’s cab driving days when the bars were central to her life. A lot has changed in America since the days of women’s liberation and the start of the gay liberation movement. A lot has changed for Annie Heaphy. She’s a kind of every-dyke, maybe the romantic hero in all of us. She reflects her times and, I hope, reflects her readers’ lives.

  Lee Lynch

  June, 2012

  Chapter One

  Annie whistled through her bus route. Her team had actually won its first game the night before. That seemed to clinch the rightness of her move to the Valley. Besides, in a spring that had been unusually wet and chilly, this was a glorious daffodil-bright early May day and she was back in shape, just achy enough to know she’d played ball.

  “You’re happy, Annie,” said Lorelei, leaning over her seat, flipping Annie’s softball cap around so the brim was backwards. Annie righted it.

  Lorelei Simski was her favorite passenger, a high-spirited white twenty-year-old with Down’s Syndrome who insisted on hugging Annie on sight. Scrupulously clean though often in mismatched clothing, Lorelei was well under average height and round as a beach ball. She had thick glasses and wore her blond hair in a Dutch boy cut.

  “Sit back down and buckle up, Lor,” she said, tempering her ferocious New York cabbie tone. This was Lorelei’s most aggravating habit. Once she was out of her seat, the rest of the riders tended to follow.

  “Whistle some more, Annie!”

  “Yeah, Annie, rock ’n roll!” urged Errol, with slurred words. Errol, her second favorite, was a bright, twenty-eight-year-old, six-foot black man with communication disorders and an ability to learn only visually.

  “Are you in love?” Lorelei asked.

  “Annie’s in love!”

  A wolf whistle was followed by other teasing.

  “Annie’s not in love,” she told them.

  “What’s his name, Annie?” someone asked.

  “What’s her name?” asked Errol, sending most of the riders into giggles.

  “Can it,” Annie shouted. The silence was total. Had she overdone it again? In the rearview mirror, she saw Lorelei pulling a long face.

  She shook her head and pulled into the Old Herb Farm parking lot. The Farm was one of the businesses of New Way Inc., an agency that worked with developmentally disabled people. Some workers made window boxes, large deck planters and wooden composters, others packaged seeds, dried and batched herbs for teas or worked the gardens, planting, harvesting and preparing flats for sale in local nurseries. Annie contentedly transported workers who weren’t on the regular bus routes, delivered products to the surrounding cities and towns and rotated from one department to another, covering for absent trainers and supervisors.

  After all those years in New York, where she’d grown an armadillo hide, the job had seemed exactly right. It had never been her intention to be a cab driver all her life. She’d wanted to do some good in the world, but never could figure out what she had to offer. And she’d never found it until she’d left the craziness of New York to move to Morton River Valley where so many of her old friends had been putting down roots.

  At the Farm, she’d immediately been drawn even to the most recalcitrant of the workers, seeing in them the frustrations and moods she hid. Now, though, Lorelei’s behavior was stirring things up and Annie seesawed between squelching her and being the pussycat she’d been in her younger years.

  She turned around to face her little gang. “It’s softball season. That’s all.”

  Lorelei immediately perked up and boasted, “We’re on the same team, Annie and me. We won yesterday. I’m batgirl!” she shouted, swooping at the others.

  Errol yelled, “I’m Batman!”

  There was a great commotion as some of the riders clamored to come to the next game. “Okay, okay,” Annie said. “I’ll ask Judy.”

  Judy Wald was the director of the Farm, a scattered woman of boundless energy. Judy might be able to organize such an after-work outing.

  Annie was whistling again during her break as she strolled to Judy’s office. She shrugged out of her ancient shit-kicker black leather jacket. Lorelei was right, of course, something more was going on with her than just softball season.

  Today was her forty-second birthday. She had a comfortable home, a great roommate, a job she loved, friends. And maybe Jo. She couldn’t get over how she was becoming involved with a bank manager—or that she was getting involved at all after Marie-Christine. She’d always had a love-hate relationship with love—afraid of being trapped in a bad marriage, lured by the concept of forever. But the thought of Jo Barker’s long upper lip turned up at the corners, of that sultry elfin look, made her smile.

  She s
waggered to a stop, straightened her blue and green striped rugby shirt, snapped a loose thread from her way-faded loose fit jeans and presented herself in Judy Wald’s doorway.

  “Annie!” said Judy, jumping, eyes wide, obviously startled.

  “Didn’t mean to spook you, Judy.”

  “I was about to come find you, as a matter of fact,” said Judy, a look of desperation behind thick glasses.

  I’m in for it now, Annie thought. Judy had spoken with her before about being gentler with the workers. It was hard switching from the dregs of humanity she’d sometimes ferried around New York to these innocents.

  Judy’s long hair, as always, was disheveled, whole corkscrews of grey rebelling from a leather barrette. She wore a faded and slightly frayed tan cardigan that looked as though it had once been expensive. Her button-down shirt was patterned with tiny ducks, its shirttails threatening to escape her khaki slacks. All her clothing looked too big on her. “I don’t know what to do. Sit down.”

  Annie helped herself to a sourball from the dish Judy kept on her desk and unwrapped it as she dropped into a chair. Judy was a comfortable, caring boss. Despite her apparent disorganization, she’d made a success of the Farm and was expert at squeezing funding from every available source—and then finding new resources. Her staff was devoted to her. She’d cut Annie some slack.

  “You look worried,” Annie told her. She held the unwrapped sourball in her fingers. “Is there a fiscal crisis? A layoff? I knew I shouldn’t have let myself get so attached to the workers.” She knew she was talking from nervousness, but couldn’t stop herself. “Did I ever tell you what it was like, driving a cab, Judy?” Annie said.

  Judy looked at her in a confused way. Annie plunged on.

  “Dispatch was always giving me a cab with broken air, because I was the white girl driver. So I’m out at JFK, windows wide open, trying to pull around a bus, and this crazy-looking guy—I mean, dirty, scraggly beard, bloodshot eyes—sticks a gun in my window, square against my head.” She mimed a pistol with her fingers and jabbed against her cheekbone.

  “How awful!” Judy said, staring at Annie.

  “He’s asking for my cash when I feel this wet stuff on my cheek. Understand, I’m just about peeing my pants and I’m wondering did he already shoot me? Is this blood? Then I get it. The jerk’s holding me up with a water pistol! The bus found a place to pull over and I’m out of there.”

  “Did you report him?”

  “I radioed it in. Never heard anything. All in a day’s work.”

  Judy snapped her focus back to her search. “I know I put that note here somewhere. I didn’t want anyone else to see it.” She shuffled through piles of paper, picked up the phone and peered under it, then looked beneath her desk. She pawed through her wastebasket. “I must have hidden it well.” Annie’s anxiety was building. She put the sourball in her pocket. “Oh! In your file! I hid it in your personnel file.”

  Annie laid her jacket on her knees and leaned her elbows on it, waiting.

  Finally, Judy sat behind her desk again, drumming her fingers. “This just doesn’t feel right.” Judy moved in her wheeled office chair around her desk to face Annie. “I got a phone call this morning. First thing. I don’t think my eyes were even open yet. I’m never ready for unpleasantness.”

  The ducks on Judy’s blouse seemed to swim as Judy shifted positions. “Do me a favor, Judy? Just get to the point? You’re weirding me out.”

  “I try not to interfere with the personal lives of the staff, Annie, but I have to deal with this.”

  Annie’s mind raced from one absurdity to another. Something’s happened to Marie-Christine. No. Why would she call me—she’s probably got half a dozen new lovers. My parents were caught in crossfire between drug gangs.

  “What, Judy, what?”

  “Were you out at Division Field last night?” Judy’s lips were tight, her eyes troubled.

  “Yes. We had a softball game.”

  “Was Lorelei Simski there with you?”

  “Not with me. She’s batgirl for the team.”

  “A Mrs.,” Judy consulted the scrap of paper she’d pulled from Annie’s file, “Norwood called to say that she saw you kissing Lorelei.”

  “Bullcrap!”

  “And touching her in ways that were what she called not normal.”

  “No way, Judy! What kind of a sicko does this woman think I am?”

  Judy winced at the onslaught of Annie’s anger.

  Annie softened her tone. “I know what she saw. That’s one reason I’m here. Lorelei did kiss me. On the lips.” She tried to keep her nose from wrinkling. “It was too quick for me to stop. Lorelei’s always hugging me and she’s been getting more and more disruptive.”

  “Tell me more,” Judy urged.

  “According to Dusty, Lorelei’s been a major fan for years, if sometimes for two opposing teams in the same game.” Judy smiled at that.

  “Ever since Lorelei got the batgirl position, she’s been off the wall. Last night, as the game was starting, she flung herself at me, which I’m used to, but instead of hugging me, she kissed me. I about fell over. She was gone before I could give her hell.”

  “Do you spend a great deal of time with Lorelei outside work?”

  “Of course not. I hang at Dusty’s Diner. Lorelei lives next door to the owner. Dusty sponsors our team and Lorelei’s been bugging her for the batgirl job. Dusty and Elly are Special Olympics sponsors partly because they know Lorelei.”

  Judy crossed her legs. “In other words, it was true.”

  “That’s not what I said! It’s not the way you make it sound, Judy. Geez.” Her shirt was soaked under her arms.

  “That’s the other problem. The woman who reported this accused the whole team of being lesbian. That you have no business putting a developmentally disabled woman among lesbians.”

  She thought of Maddy and her outrageous buttons. Why else would someone label the whole team gay? The other players were closeted. Oh, maybe some people had figured it out, but if the team had been flagrant, they’d probably have been thrown out of the league. Even she, with her loose-limbed walk, the face she’d been told all her life was so open and friendly, her medium height, just-this-side-of-chunky weight—even Annie looked “normal” to most people.

  “Judy! I can’t believe this is you talking! Do you think, even if there are gay women on the team, that they, I—” She couldn’t imagine what a non-gay woman would imagine.

  “No. No,” Judy answered. “Mrs. Norwood obviously has a problem on this subject, poor woman. And she knows Lorelei’s background. You can see how that would make the woman even more upset.”

  “I can?”

  “I suppose I ought to tell you the whole story.”

  “I’d appreciate it,” Annie replied, swallowing her rage, “because I’m getting a little bit insulted here.”

  “If Lorelei were batgirl for a men’s team and this had happened, I’d have to ask these questions.”

  “But we’re not men, for cripes’ sake. Do you think we abuse women the way men do? Are you accusing me of molesting Lorelei?”

  Judy was quiet for a moment. “It’s not simply a matter of what I think. It’s the people who give us money I have to be accountable to.” She retreated behind her desk. “You know that Lorelei’s adoptive parents had a birth daughter who also had Down’s Syndrome.”

  “This is news to me.”

  “No one reviewed worker files with you? Why didn’t you ask?”

  “Me? I’m only the driver and the pinch hitter.”

  “Annie, our workers aren’t cab fares. Every Farm employee is a big part of their lives.”

  “So it’s my fault now.”

  “No, but I wish you’d known Lorelei’s story. The parents found out a few years before their birth daughter died that the two young women had a lesbian relationship. They moved the girls into separate rooms, but they’d sneak in together. Finally, the parents put Lorelei in a group home. About ten
months later the sister died. Lorelei was despondent for two years. It took a lot of counseling to persuade her that her sister didn’t die because she left. She was just coming out of it when you arrived. I should have warned you, Annie. She’s probably looking for a new ’sister.’“

  “So that’s why she’s so hyped on me.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “First, I was just about to. Second, I don’t know how developmentally disabled people are supposed to act! I wasn’t going to make a big thing out of everyday behavior.”

  “Unfortunately, it is a big thing. Because of same-sex institutionalization and segregation in group homes to avoid pregnancy, because there are some rules—values Mrs. Norwood would call them—that you can’t instill in someone with an I.Q. this low, there can be promiscuity.” She smoothed out the scrap of paper and seemed to reread it. “I can’t afford to have such an accusation made of our staff, Annie. Maybe if you were a married woman—”

  “Are you canning me?”

  “I’d like to put you on administrative leave until we sort this out. I’m afraid I can’t pay you if you’re not working.”

  “But this Norwood woman is way far out in left field.”

  “I don’t know you, Annie. You seem reliable, if sometimes a little rough on the workers.”

  “I’m working on that, Judy.”

  “That’s all I know about you, Annie. You’ve only been here a few months—”

  Annie was hanging onto her jacket like it could absorb her anger. “If you’re doing this to me because I’m a dyke—you want me to resign? Just go away? Why don’t you just fire me?”

  “I’m not doing this to you, Annie, I’m doing it for the Farm. You don’t know this community. This could destroy us. The Farm gives so much to the workers. Do you want me to risk that?” Annie didn’t want to admit that almost made sense.