Bull Sugar

By Virginia Aronson

Alyson Soule is a novice journalist working for a Florida newspaper. A hospital calls to inform her that her forty-one-year-old mother has overdosed again. Virgie Soule's addiction is related to her secret past, which Alyson is determined to uncover.

Back when Virgie was a college student, she volunteered to spend the summer in

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dixi Books (UK) Limited
• Release date: Nov 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781913680558

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Dixi Books

Copyright © 2022 by Virginia Aronson

Copyright © 2022 Dixi Books

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced or transmitted to any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information and retrieval system, without written permission from the Publisher.

Bull Sugar: A Not So Sweet Novel

Virginia Aronson

Editor: Cherry Carlson

Proofreading: Andrea Bailey

Cover Design: Rosa Llano Ferro

Interior Design: Pablo Ulyanov

I. Edition: February 2022

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Virginia Aronson - 1st ed.

ISBN: 978-1-913680-33-6

1. Literature 2. Ecology 3. Environmental Philosophy

4. Historical Fiction

© Dixi Books Publishing

293 Green Lanes, Palmers Green, London, England, N13 4XS

[e-mail]

www.dixibooks.com

VIRGINIA ARONSON

BULL SUGAR

A Not-So-Sweet Novel

SPRING 2008

Alyson

When her editor summoned her to his office, a cluttered cubicle only fifteen feet from her own, Alyson Soule held up a hand and frowned. She was on her cell phone with the emergency room that had admitted her mother a few hours earlier. Whatever Geo had to say could wait.

Pointing to his clunky vintage watch, he mouthed, Soon?

Alyson nodded. She turned her back on him and sat down in her rolling office chair, returning her focus to the phone call. At twenty-one, she was a responsible person, one who took her duties seriously, more seriously than most people her age. More seriously than her mother, who preferred a tumbler of whiskey and a joint to any form of work. And where had that gotten them, Alyson thought with a frown.

Is she conscious? she asked the nurse, who had an accent she couldn’t place. Guatemalan? Cuban? Mexican? It could be any of those, considering the hospital was in Lake Worth, Florida, home to many Latin American immigrants—and to Alyson’s alcohol and prescription drug abusing mother.

No, the nurse told her. But she will be okay. We found your contact information in her wallet. Are you available to come?

Alyson sighed. "I am but I wish I wasn’t. Don’t think I’m being callous, but she does this a lot. So I get these calls. A lot."

The nurse said nothing. She probably heard this kind of response all the time. In South Florida, overdoses were an ER daily norm.

I’m on the west coast of the state in the Naples area, so I won’t be able to get there for a couple hours, Alyson finally said. Please call me if anything changes.

The nurse agreed to do so.

Alyson tucked her cell in the side pocket of her backpack and turned off her desktop computer. The workplace hum around her was familiar and reassuringly low key. Over the whoosh of the window air conditioners came the murmur of mostly male voices and the rat-a-tat-tap of keyboards. The Gulf Flamingo had a small staff of underpaid reporters who often worked from home. Since the paper was a weekly, deadlines were easy to meet and the atmosphere was not hectic like at the large, busy newspaper rooms where she’d interned. Her beat was food and agriculture, so her stories were breezy and warm, with simple recipes and restaurant reviews, lively interviews with local chefs and farmers. Occasionally, however, she had the chance to cover something deeper, an important issue or a controversial subject like agricultural runoff and toxic algae, the abuse of farm animals, or Florida’s dying citrus industry. She liked it best when her stories were hardboiled with a generous side of snark.

Kind of like her mother, Alyson thought with a grimace. She tidied her desk and stood up. As much as she tried to not follow in her mother’s staggering footsteps, they did share some personality traits. Stubbornness, for one. And a naïve desire to make a difference in the world.

It was doubtful Alyson would accomplish this at The Gulf Flamingo.

On her way out, she stopped off at Geo’s cubicle. He was hunched over his keyboard, his long dark face haggard. For the last year, he’d been working late nights, spending his days trying to secure more advertising revenue. He was worried the paper would go under and he’d be held accountable by the owners of the national chain. Poor Geo. Maybe she’d befriended him because he was a kind of modern day hero, jousting at corporate windmills. Heroic figures had always inspired her.

She told him, Sorry, but I gotta go. It’s my mother again. I’ll be back in a few days. And don’t worry, she promised. I’ll have the piece on the tilapia farm finished before we go to press. Recipes and all.

He gazed up at her. I hope this visit goes better than the last one.

She thanked him and left the newsroom. If you could call it that.

As she hurried down the dirty cement stairs of the two-story office building, she thought about Geo. Her beat sucked but he was thoughtful, occasionally giving her the leeway to pursue stories she cared about. If she could cover the more pressing issues of the day, and there were many, she might feel more passion for her work.

Her life, Alyson decided as she headed across the asphalt parking lot, lacked passion.

The heat from the blacktop seeped through her leather flats and she was sweating in her long-sleeved Oxford shirt. It would be a hot, uncomfortable drive across the state to see her mother. It was only the first week in May, but for the third time this year she would have to sit with her mom in a hospital room and try to talk some sense into her. No more booze. Not while you’re on painkillers and antidepressants. And why are you taking both? Cut back on the pills!

Wasn’t this common sense? Why didn’t her mother have any?

The faux leather seats of her aging Honda were hot enough to cook scrambled eggs. So Alyson rolled down all the windows, then stood in the stingy shade of a cabbage palm for a minute before sliding behind the wheel. Which burned her hands enough for her to moan out loud.

South Florida. The place was a crazy frying pan.

Easing out of her parking space, she noted with satisfaction there was enough gas to get across Alligator Alley. But she would need to stop at the bank for some cash. Her mother was always short.

As she pulled out of the small lot, Alyson turned the air conditioner on high, hoping for a blast of cool air.

She felt nothing.

The line was long at the admissions desk. Ambulances screamed to a halt outside the sliding glass doors, and rubber shoes squeaked across the shiny tile floors. The desk clerk asked for her ID, then motioned her to a second desk where an older woman with reading glasses sat behind a blocky computer.

Her mother was no longer in the ER, she’d been transferred upstairs and would be there overnight, the curt admissions clerk said. Alyson got directions and headed for the elevator.

The hospital room was a double and her mother lay in the bed by the window. The curtain was drawn to separate the two beds, ostensibly to allow each patient some privacy. But an intermittent stream of nurses in pink or blue scrubs came and went, speaking in loud voices to the apparently hard-of-hearing woman on the other side of the salmon-colored drapes. After only ten minutes in the hard aluminum chair at her mother’s bedside, Alyson knew all about the roommate’s intestinal issues. She wished her mother would wake up and distract her from the in-depth discussion of prior results with colonics and laxatives.

Her mother slept on, the IV drip constant, the sound of her breathing a familiar reassurance. Virgie Soule looked so small in the starched white bed, short and skinny and flat-chested as a kid. Even at forty-one, she appeared youthful. She acted like a teenager too. An out of control wild child, Alyson thought with a frown.

She stood up and stretched, then leaned her forehead against the thick