I had family here, a fledgling business with classes and personal training. But that didn’t mean that this West Virginia town was home. Once the Callie Kendall case was resolved, then I would decide.
Stay or go.
“Think about it,” Mrs. Morganson advised. “Your own space to set up any way you want. A set schedule. I bet a gym would do real well in Bootleg so folks could work off all that moonshine.”
“I’ll take it under advisement,” I promised. “Now, if you ladies will excuse me, I’m gonna go celebrate D’s victory with an egg white omelet before my next class.”
2
Shelby
The Brunch Club served up fancy breakfast with steaming sides of hot gossip. Bootleg Springs residents bellied up to the restaurant’s sleek concrete bar or leaned forward in cushioned booths to catch up on the town’s latest rumors while enjoying goat cheese frittatas and fried chicken biscuits with mango chia smoothies.
As a natural observer, I couldn’t get enough of the crowd.
“Did y’all hear that Moe Dailey’s bloodhound got loose again? Knocked up Lacey Dickerson’s purebred Shih Tzu,” Mrs. Varney shouted over the restaurant din. In deference to the sunny late spring morning, she was decked out in cropped black elastic waist pants that stopped just short of her boobs.
There were seven of us squeezed into a big corner booth at the back of the restaurant. I was the youngest by at least three decades.
“There’s something for your notes, Shelby.” Old Jefferson Waverly, the only male member of our gathering, poked a fork in my direction. “Bootleg Springs has a long memory and a fine appreciation for karma.”
“Mm-hmm.” The group nodded enthusiastically. They waited for me to write it down, and I obliged. I’d been adopted by The Breakfast Club—not to be confused with the Brunch Club—a collection of Bootleg elders who generally doled out advice and caused mischief. Especially on bingo nights.
I’d come to town with a very specific objective and quickly came to the realization that I wouldn’t be able to simply hang out on the sidelines and observe. No, this small town required full-contact participation before it would open its arms to an outsider. It was participant observation at its finest. I was Jane Goodall, and Bootleggers were my subjects.
They had tentatively accepted me as one of their own. Well, most of them had. There were a few outliers still holding out on me. But I’d wear them down. I always did.
By involving myself in town life, I’d gained more than just the insight I was looking for. These crafty neighbors took my original plan and narrow thesis, doused it with moonshine, then set it on fire.
At their behest, rather than conducting a few dozen or so face-to-face interviews, I’d built an online survey and made it available to the entire town as of two days ago. It included brief personality assessments, questions around how residents related to the larger community, as well as role identification tags and rating systems for compassion, social justice, and participation.
Essentially, my little nerd survey was designed to pick apart exactly who Bootleg Springs was made up of and why they worked so well together. The most recent shiny example of their community activism occurred when the town banded together to evict a crowd of overzealous, disrespectful journalists.
Those same residents were now helping me earn my doctorate one survey answer at a time.
“Guess they’ll have a litter of shithounds on their hands,” Granny Louisa mused. Her life partner, Estelle—black to Louisa’s lily white and genteel South Carolina to Louisa’s rough-and-tumble West Virginia—high-fived her.
“Better than havin’ bloodshits,” Jefferson cackled.
All around the table, good Southern ladies threw their napkins down and glared. Jefferson snickered.
“Anyway, serves her right for dumping that poor Jonah Jr. at the prom,” Gertrude, AKA Gram-Gram, commented while scooping up grits.
The rest of the table clucked their sympathy, voicing their concerns that the man would never find a decent mate. I made a few notes in my notebook. The elders of Bootleg Springs shared an interest in the love lives of what they deemed the “youngins.” Apparently with the pairing off three of the five Bodines, they were itching for a full house resolution.
The “poor” Jonah Jr. they were discussing was Jonah Bodine. Illegitimate son of the deceased Jonah Sr. and one of the holdouts who still didn’t think highly of me. He’d shown up in town days after his father’s funeral upon discovering from the obituary that he had four half-siblings. Jonah was, according to Myrt Crabapple, “the spittin’ image of his