Everyone knew that Roanne never got angryÂŹâuntil the night she killed her ex-husband and herself.
Roanne, a nice, suburban lady in her sixties who works at a Hallmark shop and volunteers at the Food Bank in Round Rock, Texas, calls her lifelong friend, Connie, confesses to murder, then puts the gun to her own head. Connie, spurred by Roanneâs last words about a lifetime of unspoken rage, sets aside her work as a cozy mystery writer and cupcake shop owner to confront the men who have stolen her dignity while she remained silent, including a bully brother, a rapist, and an ex-spouse. On a journey to reclaim her inner power and to make peace with the loss of her treasured friend, Connieâs mission is to avoid the same tragic path as Roanne, but she takes along a gun, just in case.
Paper Targets, by Patricia Watts, calls us to speak our own narratives, even when it is uncomfortable or risky, and shows us the magnificence of a friendship that transcends time.
Everyone knew that Roanne never got angryÂŹâuntil the night she killed her ex-husband and herself.
Roanne, a nice, suburban lady in her sixties who works at a Hallmark shop and volunteers at the Food Bank in Round Rock, Texas, calls her lifelong friend, Connie, confesses to murder, then puts the gun to her own head. Connie, spurred by Roanneâs last words about a lifetime of unspoken rage, sets aside her work as a cozy mystery writer and cupcake shop owner to confront the men who have stolen her dignity while she remained silent, including a bully brother, a rapist, and an ex-spouse. On a journey to reclaim her inner power and to make peace with the loss of her treasured friend, Connieâs mission is to avoid the same tragic path as Roanne, but she takes along a gun, just in case.
Paper Targets, by Patricia Watts, calls us to speak our own narratives, even when it is uncomfortable or risky, and shows us the magnificence of a friendship that transcends time.
A slurp and a gulp. The knock of something solid against the surface next to the phone. Common noises on the other end of the lineâsheâs taking a drink, setting down a glass.
Thenâthe ear-splitting boom of a gunshot, the shallow thud of a weight hitting the floor.Â
I scream her name.
No noises now.
My best friend is dead.
At Roanneâs funeral reception, the eagerness for answers was thicker than the abundant short ribs set out next to the potato salad and baked beans. The guests had no appetite. They wanted to sink their teeth into why Roanne chose to die the way she did. And they were all looking to me, her closest friend for fifty years.Â
People had driven to Round Rock from other parts of Texas or from farther away to spend the morning at the church, midday at the cemetery, and the afternoon gathered at the home of Roanneâs sister, Darla.Â
They leaned out and asked, âWhy, Connie?â as I walked through Darlaâs living room, taking small, deliberate sips from a glass of iced tea, avoiding eye contact, unable to respond.
 Roanne had called me that night, at three minutes after eleven. Iâd hit the TV âoffâ button, was headed to bed, had stayed up too late again, hooked on my latest Netflix binge. The words we had exchanged played back to me with every shiver and stab to my heart that I had felt then:
âI got the bastard,â she said.  From the hollow sound of her voice, I knew her phone was on speaker.  âStraight through the balls.â Her words shook.Â
âRo? Youâre scaring me, girl,â I said. âGot who?â
 She was breathing hard, with a sharp, staccato, âUh, uh âŚâ Â
âIs someone with you?â
âNot anymore. Just me, myself, and I,â she said between a snicker and a sob.
âAre you at home? Iâll come get you.â My adrenalin was pumping. Something terrible had happened or was about to happen, but what? I could make the ninety-five-mile drive from San Antonio to Round Rock in an hour and ten. I switched my phone to speaker and pulled a pair of leggings on under my nightshirt.
âDonât bother, Iâll be done soon.â She breathed in, a deep reverse sigh, like she was struggling to find the strength to get the words out. âThe anger. You take it and take it, and one day you see thereâs no way out. Youâre trapped.â
âYouâre angry? With whom?â
 âWith Johnny, with the whole goddamn male establishment, my daddy, the school bullies, the boss, the superintendent, the judge, the lovers, husband, ex-husband, the smartass at Home Depot, the whole lot of  âem, every Tom, Dick, and Harry.â
Her words seemed silly and frightening. âThatâs a bunch to take on by yourself. Why donât we talk about it, regroup?â I needed to get between her and whatever it was that was galloping, like my heartbeat, toward her. Couldnât you find someoneâs location on a cell phone? But you had to set that up, and I had had no reason to before.Â
âNow what would Judd do?â she said.
I pulled the name from the past through my memory to the present. It didnât fit in the moment. âJudd? Mr. Asher from senior social studies?â
âYou know what I really liked about Mr. Asher?â
âHe looked like David Cassidy?â Giggle, Roanne. Be okay, Roanne.
âExactly, that too.â I pictured her smiling through the pain in her voice. âHe seemed to have all the answers, didnât he? Only he wanted us to figure things out on our own.â
I stepped into my running shoes, left the laces untied. âWhat does Mr. Asher have to do withââ
 âFigure it out for yourself. Speak up, Con. Donât let them have the final say.â Roanneâs words slurred and trailed off. âItâs too late for me, butââÂ
âHang on, itâs never too late.â I could feel the bad ending like the anticipation of an icy finger about to touch the back of my neck, raising goose flesh. I picked up my keys and purse. I headed for the garage. Keep talking, Roanne, please keep talking. âTell me where you are, sweetie.â
Another intake of air.  A gap of silence.  A gulp.  The boom. âRoanne!â
My iced tea sloshed onto Darlaâs living room carpet as a hand reached out from the sofa and snagged my elbow.Â
A thirtyish, delicate-looking man in a dark suit and ostrich cowboy boots balanced a paper plate of untouched food on his lap and looked up at me.
âConnie?â he said, his pained frown making his wire-rimmed glasses slip off the bridge of his nose.
 I had met him before, the assistant manager at the Hallmark shop where Roanne had been employed for the past sixteen years. What was his name? Something French. Jacques. Jean. Didnât the ladies at the shop call him Jay?Â
âHow could she do that to her daughters?â the young man pleaded. He didnât seem to expect an answer. âYou canât blame them for not coming to the funeral, can you?â He picked at the food on his plate.Â
The coronerâs report had said the bullet that Roanne sent from the pistol into her right temple killed her instantly. Johnny, her ex-husband, had died more slowly, bleeding out on the garage floor from a gunshot to the genitals.
âHow are you holding up?â the man on the sofa asked.  âYou must feel so ⌠you were so much closer to her than any of us. Did she give any signs?â
Across the room, I caught Darlaâs eye. Her hands fretted with a napkin. Her look beckoned me.
 âOh, I donât mean you were to blame in any way,â the young man said. âOf course thereâs nothing you could have done. She was obviously very disturbed. You just wonder after something like this, donât you? Was there some clue you missed, we all missed?â He slapped his forehead with the flat of his palm. âIâm going on, arenât I? Itâs how I deal with something so, so ⌠so sorry.â He caught my hand and squeezed it. âConnie, Iâm so sorry for the pain you must be going through.â
His words brought back the image of a man I had passed in the back of the church as I was leaving the funeral. He had spoken to me, with the same words, even my name. I hadnât recognized the older gentleman in a tweed coat with thick white hair swept back off his forehead, but something about him had been familiar, the eyes that smiled in spite of his somber words. I had thanked him and continued to the exit.
âExcuse me,â I said to Jay-Jean-Jacques, âIâm going to check on Darla.âÂ
Darla greeted me with a stoic smile and a long hug. We had rarely seen each other, even on my trips to Round Rock to see Roanne, but death can pull together what life has not.  She was younger than Roanne by five years, a shorter and forty-pounds-heavier version of her statuesque sister, her blonde bouffant stiff with a generous application of hair spray.Â
 Tears had washed pale streaks through her makeup and smudged her mascara. Her pink lipstick was faded and revealed a speck of dried blood on her lower lip where she may have bitten it. A smear of barbecue sauce stained the front of her navy crepe dress.Â
 âSit with me,â Darla said and steered me to chairs near the sliding glass doors to the patio. She pulled a shoebox from under her chair and handed it to me.Â
âWhatâs this?â I asked.
âSome old photos I came across. I thought you might want them. Remember all those pictures taken of us kids every time our families got together?â
I cradled the box on my lap. âMy mom was a crazy woman when she had a camera in her hand.â
The Slaters and the Canellis had been close ever since the Slaters moved in three houses down from ours on Pecan Street in Austin, the year Roanne and I turned fifteen. My dad was an aircraft engineer at Bergstrom Air Force Base. My mom stayed home, mothering and housekeeping. Mr. Slater owned a roofing company. Mrs. Slater mostly kept out of sight, more often than not just a voice from the back bedroom, âunder the weather.â
  âWeather,â Roanne would say, âis Mommyâs favorite brand of vodka.âÂ
Darla threw up her hands. âWhat am I gonna do with all that food?â She burst into tears and covered her mouth to stifle the sound.
The table in the center of the room groaned with Darlaâs culinary handiwork, which on any other occasion would have been picked clean by now. I set my glass and the box on the floor and put an arm around her.Â
âIâve prayed and prayed, âLord Jesus, help me understand,ââ she said, âbut I just donât. Thank God, Mommy and Daddy have passed and donât have to deal with this. How could she do it?â
I patted her shoulder. âI donât understand either, hon.âÂ
Darla turned to me. âHave you talked to the girls?âÂ
âTo Stella. She flew back to Virginia right after Johnnyâs burial service. Zoe wonât take my calls. She hasnât spoken to Roanne in years and now âŚÂ  I donât know how an orphan adopted from the other side of the world processes losing a second set of parents.â
âNo oneâs touched your angel food-orange cake. It was so sweet of you. You shouldnât have gone to the trouble.â Darla looked like she might cry again.Â
I gently squeezed her upper arm. âIt was no trouble. You know me. I always bring the cake, whether Iâm asked to or not.â
âAnd how are you coping, dear?â she asked.
I hesitated. I was expecting the âThese are the times you need faithâ talk from Darla.  What I needed, according to other well-wishers over the past week, was community, routine, counseling, or hot yoga.Â
I wasnât falling apart. I had taken to scrubbing my bathtubs more than normal, but, otherwise, I did the usual, watered and weeded my tiny garden enough to keep most of the plants alive, went to the grocery store once a week. I put in a minimum four hours of writing daily on my latest book and kept my author Website up to date. My blog posts had become sporadic, but I still made an effort.Â
I still volunteered every other week as a docent at the Witte Museum, and, although I had temporarily misplaced my motivation to move it or lose it with Wednesday senior water aerobics at the YMCA, I planned to restart the class sometime soon.
 I still talked as usual with my neighbors whenever we crossed paths while checking the mail or taking out the trash or on early evening walks, though they tended to stay inside their air-conditioned spaces most of the year. We were a loose community who mostly minded our own business.
But, I couldnât avoid thinking, about the times I would have called Roanne or driven up to see her or met her somewhere in between, and sleep had become a nightly torment.Â
Movies had played in my head for the past week. They came up out of the blue at any time of the day. Roanne and me, little scenes from our lives together. They came with a distinct memory of when each had originally occurred, the year, sometimes the exact date, scenes from several months ago or when we were young wives and moms or girls in high school. Each time, I was there, and she was there, like it was happening in the present. Each morning, I would awake after barely nodding off, rattled out of my sleep with tremors in my hands, furious with Roanne and missing her like crazy at the same time.
 When it came to sharing feelings, Roanne and my sister had been my tiny comfort zone for a long time. I didnât open up to Darla.  âIâm okay,â I said. âSome days are harder than others.â
âI pray for you, and I pray for Roanneâs immortal soul, that she had the time to accept Jesus as her Savior and ask Him for forgiveness befor she ⌠she spoke to you before she ⌠what did she say?â
âShe wasnât making sense. She mentioned a teacher from Bonham.â I paused to rerun from memory Roanneâs other ramblings. âShe said anger was a trap, and I should speak up. Gibberish, really.ââ
Darla stared at me. âShe was angry at a teacher from high school?â
âNo. Just angry.âÂ
 âThat doesnât sound like Roanne. I know she took it hard when Johnny left her, but, my God, that was almost twenty-five years ago. For all her failings, and, of course, we are all in need of Godâs mercy, no one can say she wasnât a cheerful person.â Â
That was true. Roanne had lifted me out of the dumps with her smile or a clever word more times than I could remember. Our lives had run parallel in many waysâcollege right after high school, marriage soon after college, both to military guys who served in Vietnam. They were best buddies like us, her Johnny and my Scott, two daughters for her, one son for me. Both divorces were ugly events that seemed much longer than necessary compared to the marriages of nineteen years for hers, mine after twenty-four.Â
 âLord Jesus, help me understand,â Darla repeated. âScott was a jerk, too. You divorced him. You didnât do ⌠that.â
âMy life didnât splinter into bits around me. She lost everything she cared about because of those rumors.â
âHer and that student.â
âShe always blamed Johnny.â
 âShe couldnât prove Johnny had anything to do with those rumors,â Darla said, an irritation in her voice, or maybe just fatigue.
âYou can know somethingâs true even if you canât prove it.â
âStill, you move on, donât you? Youâre not going to go over to Scottâs house with a gun andââ Darlaâs volume went up a notch, her tone bitter. ââDomestic violence,â thatâs what they said on the TV news. Roanne wasnât violent. She was a nice lady, just like you and me.âÂ
 âMaybe there was a part of her we didnât see?âÂ
âNonsense. Roanne was transparent as a picture window,â Darla said. She put a hand to her mouth. âOh, my, the boys will be disappointed there are no bones for them. After the guests finish off the ribs, I always give them the bones.â
âThe boysâ were Darlaâs two Cairn terriers. Roanne and I had concluded long ago that the dogs were substitutes for Darlaâs sons, the one who had died as a child and the one who stayed far away on one business assignment or another.
I touched her hand. Distraction had always been Darlaâs way of coping. She was stuck in her living room full of grief with no immediate escape route, no place to secretly wolf down a pint of ice cream or a pan of brownies.
She curled away from me and pulled her hand out of my reach. âIt must have been an accident. I refuse to believe she could have ⌠â
âShot Johnny, then turned the gun on herself?â
Darla shook her head and waved her hand in a dismissive motion, like she was trying to erase my words. âNo, Iâve read about this kind of thing. Women donât do it.â
I caught her hand and patted it. âBut she did do it, hon, she did.â
Darla abruptly stood up. âThat potato salad wonât keep.â
Everyone knows that women are nice and women do not get angry, and Roanne was living proof of that, until she wasnât â living nor nice and not angry.
After years of bottling everything in, Roanne murders her ex-husband and commits suicide. Her last words were not an apology, but simply an advice for her best friend not to live the same way.
After listening to her best friend of over 50 years take her own life over the phone, Connie decides to stand up to all the men in her life who had hurt her and made her feel worthless and angry â an emotion she couldnât show at the time. And if things go wrong? She has a gun with her.
The story is an absolute page-turner. Every scene, every word, every situation is bound to have readers diving head-first into this book. It has everything; action, horror, crime, drama, and romance.
The plot sheds light on really important issues like family dynamics, parenting, substance abuse, regrets, assault, sexism, discrimination â all matters that women still find relatable nowadays (unfortunately).
Each character introduced plays its role to the fullest, no part of the book feels like a boring filler, but it is all skillfully put together to build the characters and their psyche.
The writing is amazing. The authorâs voice is very engaging and entrancing, it was impossible to put the book down once I had begun reading.
Everything about this book is fascinating â the writing, the characters, the plot, and the emotions. This book and its characters are bound to stay with readers long after it has been finished. Despite being fictional, the message within is the realist it can be.
I recommend Paper Targets by Patricia Watts to all lovers of fiction in general, but especially to those who feel like theyâve been wronged at one point (and, honestly, who hasnât?).