Episodes 15 and 16: The Girl at the Tiller

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“Hubert" - modeled by Charlotte Rains Dixon’s beloved Chip. Charlotte is an author, writing coach, and friend - check out her substack at https://wordstrumpet.substack.com/ and the website for writing workshops offered by Charlotte Rains Dixon and Deborah Guyol at https://www.letsgowriteworkshops.com/

Episode 15 begins: Celia Prewitt has a secret. The episode follows 81-year old retired highschool teacher Celia Prewitt, her granddaughter Olga, and her ghost-dog Hubert.

Episode 15 Excerpt

It would shock just about everyone to discover she has a secret.

It isn’t that she used to play the trumpet and the trombone, making a big cheerful sound at rallies and parades and even, for a few years, as part of the orchestra for the Looser Island Community Theater. Most people know about her musical background, and even if they didn’t they could have guessed from the fact that she still gives music lessons to a few select students. Anyway, far from shocking anyone, the islanders are tickled to think of diminutive Mrs. Prewitt tootling on the trumpet or blasting on the ‘bone.

And it isn’t that she used to be a teacher at the Looser Island High School. During the decades when Mrs. Prewitt was teaching, that was almost the only career open to a woman who worked rather than staying home with her children. Also, many of the adults who grew up on the island were her students, once upon a time. She was very strict, according to those who’d had her as a teacher, especially with the boys, but you have to be strict if you want to get anything through those thick skulls and raging hormones, Mrs. Prewitt always says.

Most people even know what she wanted to teach was math—algebra and geometry and pre-calculus, “the logical arts”—but that wasn’t what women did in those days. Women taught English or home economics or French or Spanish. So she taught English Literature and Spanish, and if some of Shakespeare’s more lyrical and powerful scenes got short shrift in her Lit class, and the students in her Spanish class never learned to trill their “r”s properly, well, that was what came of having a shortsighted principal who assigned classes according to gender rather than the teachers’ talents.

Really, Celia Prewitt doesn’t seem the type to have secrets, but if anyone had known she was hiding something, they might have wondered if it was somehow related to her granddaughter, Olga.

Read the rest of the episode, and subscribe here https://sharilane.substack.com/p/episode-15-the-girl-at-the-tiller

Episode 16 Excerpt

It’s now the week before the Fourth of July, Charlie’s last chance to find his muse. He appears in Mrs. Prewitt’s living room again, and this time he plays “America the Beautiful” with fewer mistakes.

Mrs. Prewitt praises him, and he glows at her praise, a pinkish light like sunrise on his acne-scarred cheeks. She suggests he let the parade organizers know he’s ready to play in the parade, and he says, bashfully, Okay.

Realtor, Water District Board Chair, and unofficial Island Siren Cherry Duluth is heading up the parade committee this year. Mrs. Prewitt knows Cherry is just this side of terrifying to Charlie, possibly because of rather than in spite of her sexual exploits. On the other hand, both teacher and student know one of the many lovely aspects of living on a tiny island is that (almost) everyone is supportive of the island’s young adults, who are practically an endangered species, and (almost) everyone will cheer long and loud at Charlie’s attempts, regardless of his success and his skill, or lack thereof.

“Shall I r-r-run through the song again, Mrs. Prewitt?” Charlie says.

“Yes please,” Mrs. Prewitt says.

This time, Charlie’s rendition is even better, the tune almost recognizable.

“Excellent,” Mrs. Prewitt says.

“B-B-But Mrs. Prewitt?” he says.

“Yes, Charlie?”

“I s-s-still . . . I still feel patriotic.”

And Celia Prewitt feels an almost perverse pride in his statement, and relief, knowing that she hasn’t stolen Charlie’s innocence, and more importantly that he’s making his own decisions, not adopting others’ ideas indiscriminately.

See? Hubert says, wandering over and curling up under the piano bench where his ghostly form is barely visible against the old beige carpet. I knew he’d find an even keel, given enough time and patience.

Read the rest of the episode, and subscribe herettps://sharilane.substack.com/p/episode-16-the-girl-at-the-tiller

Photo by Lord Runar from Getty Images (adjusted to match the story line)

Episodes 13 and 14: Jazz Man

Image by MarthaHinz from Pixabay (text added)

Episode 13: Jazz Man - Music at the Mini-Mart

Excerpt

Arnold quietly laments that he is not named something other than Arnold. Something like Thelonious or Dizzy or maybe even Miles.

Arnold plays The Sax. He always has at least one (bari, tenor, alto, or soprano), and often more than one, behind the counter at the Mini-Mart where he works. The instruments are a little battered, and a little tarnished, except right after he polishes them. The pure, painfully beautiful strains can be heard wafting across the small, graveled parking area in the early mornings, and more than one tourist has been surprised, when stopping in for a cup of bad coffee or a package of Donettes, to find the lovely sounds aren’t coming from a Muzak system but from the heart and soul of a smallish older man standing stoop-shouldered and closed-faced behind the counter.

Mostly he plays the old standbys that casual jazz aficionados will recognize: “Stella by Starlight,” “Take Five,” “Pennies from Heaven,” “God Bless the Child.” If he’s feeling particularly melancholy—he is a musician, after all—it’s “They Can’t Take That Away From Me,” or “Flying Home.” The be-pimpled adolescent whose shifts follow Arnold’s (he can never remember the kid’s name, but it might be one of those Looser Island names like Dandelion or Sea Star) sometimes gives Arnold an inscrutable look when arriving at the store, but Arnold ignores the look. Arnold is old enough to understand the phrase Kids these days in his bones and in his gut.

Like most of the other island residents, Arnold is accompanied wherever he goes―even to work―by his canine companion. Gus is an aging Basset Hound, a gentle foil to his human’s curmudgeonliness who, as is good and right and proper for a jazz man’s dog, is a music-lover and an enthusiastic audience. Luckily for Arnold and the Mini-Mart customers, Gus shows his appreciation by smiling and wagging his tail rather than howling along.

Arnold is not Black―another misfortune for a jazz musician, in his mind, another injury to his muse. He is plainly white, with a narrow face framed by long yellow-white hair that he wears in a single braid reaching almost to his skinny behind. He has wild white eyebrows but no other facial hair to speak of, having decided long ago to give up on the dream of a ZZ-Top-style beard to match his braid. In spite of his oh-so-ordinary name and the decidedly pale cast of his skin, Arnold was moderately famous in his youth and even into middle age, a fact none of the other islanders knows or would have guessed.

Read the rest of the Episode, and subscribe, here.

Episode 14: Jazz Man - Going Home

Excerpt

When you are young, the body absorbs emotional trauma, and hides it behind smooth skin and clear gray-green eyes and wispy flyaway hair the color of a chestnut nestled in a dimple in the soil, a chestnut that fell from a tree and rolled to rest near the grave marked by the most expensive tombstone Arnold’s parents could afford. It’s not a jazz song per se, and Arnold is generally a purist, but when thinking of his sister’s death the soundtrack is always Peter Gabriel’s “I Grieve.” He can’t remember the words (the tune is stuck in his head on an endless loop), but he knows it’s something about how life goes on and on and on and on.

The body soldiers on as if nothing’s happened, but all those traumas must come out some day. The memory of the elfin body of his sister being lowered into the ground, the job in the warehouse that he didn’t get and didn’t want but really needed, the dog who ran into the street at just the wrong moment, the coffee spilled on the new pants he’d coveted and saved for, the lymphoma that ate up his mother’s stomach from the inside like some voracious Pac Man, the girl he liked who said No when he asked her out, the liver failure that took down his father after rage and despair had hollowed out what was left of his heart . . . each has its own malignance, the petty anxieties and life-wracking tragedies working a dark magic on the exterior. Each moment and string of moments muscles its way, over time, to the surface, and leaves its mark.

And who wants to look at a map of his own grief and disappointment every day?

(Gus always points out making joyful music and laughing with friends in the Louisiana sunshine also have a time-stamp, which Arnold grudgingly concedes. But still.)

Read the rest of the Episode, and subscribe here.

Episodes 11 and 12: He Who Stays Put

Jenny and Seth and Jerry Garcia

Many thanks to Gini Chin (again!) for the marvelous photo

Excerpt of Episode 11:

Seth means many things. One of them is this: “He who stays put.”

In her first twenty-two years on this earth, Jenny drifted from place to place. Her mother, whatever-spirit-there-may-or-may-not-be-rest-her-soul, was a self-proclaimed hippie who didn’t want to be tied down. After her mother passed away, her father moved frequently in an attempt to find some place that would fulfill his longing for space to breathe, he later told Jenny, but also where he would feel he was meeting the minimum requirements of fatherhood.

Jenny emancipated herself at the age of seventeen and then continued as her parents had begun. She couldn’t tell if she was peripatetic by nature (on her mother’s side) or just by habit (on her father’s side), but either way she couldn’t seem to settle, until she found herself on Looser Island, pregnant, alone, but somehow, finally, home.

So she named her baby Seth.

Read the rest of the episode, and subscribe here https://sharilane.substack.com/p/he-who-stays-put

Excerpt of Episode 12:

Jenny and Seth were vegetarians, and she worried they’d have nothing for a carnivore, but the dog seemed quite willing to join them in their lentil stew. He ate and ate, and and allowed them to rub away some of the mud and the stench with warm wet towels soaked in castile soap. Then he fell asleep. Seth sat near him, resting one hand on the dog’s head or his hind quarters the whole time.

That night, the dog slept in Seth’s bed.

They did the responsible thing, and put up posters, copied on the post office copier without payment (though that thought hardly made a dent on Jenny’s conscience, under the circumstances). Jenny also notified Genevieve Macy of the online Looser Island Bulletin, who included a note in the next bi-weekly newsletter.

No one claimed him.

Fourteen years after becoming a parent, Jenny decided it was time to act like an adult. She brought Jerry Garcia to the vet for shots and to get the gash on his leg looked at, treated him for fleas, and even registered him with the county. In fact, Jerry Garcia was probably the only dog on Looser Island who was registered, and Jenny felt inordinately proud of herself.

When it was time to choose a name, Seth wanted to call him Fred, or maybe Leon, but this time it was Jenny who put her foot down. Her father loved the Grateful Dead, raising his daughter on “Ripple” and “US Blues.” She declared the dog would be called Jerry Garcia, and she brooked no argument on the matter.

Read the rest of the episode, and subscribe here https://sharilane.substack.com/p/episode-12-he-who-stays-put

Episodes 9 and 10: Homesick

Alessandra, Ralph, and Barbara’s Breakfast Bar

Excerpt of Episode 9

“It takes more than sunshine, soil, and rain to make a flower grow.”

Thus spake Alessandra, in her speech to the mostly-white-haired Board of the Junior Foreign Aide Brigade. (That’s how Alessandra thought of her speech—at sixteen, she was a budding nihilist, misunderstanding Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra as a call to rather than a warning against a philosophy of nothingness. She was well on her way to driving her parents crazy with her philosophizing, and if they complained, she shot back with “To make the individual uncomfortable, that is my task,” and other exasperating Nietzsche-isms.)

Alessandra was a homegrown islander, and so, although love and creature comforts were available to her in moderate supply from the day she first graced this earth, she spent almost the whole of her childhood longing with every fiber of her being to get away.

The Junior Foreign Aide Brigade, or JFAB, seemed as good an escape plan as any.

Read the rest of Episode 9 here

*******

Excerpt of Episode 10

“I am leaving the pension,” her landlady says one day. Her landlady likes to practice her English with Alessandra, though she speaks it thickly, hesitantly. “I do not know if the new owner will rent to you.”

“Why?” Alessandra says, confronting the misery of change externally imposed. Is this what it feels like to be an adult? The constant thrust of unasked-for change?

“I am going to help my son start the wheat farm,” the landlady says.

“But you have no experience with farming,” Alessandra says. As if her landlady had asked her permission. Or even her opinion.

“Ah, Alessandra, all it needs to make the wheat grow is the sunshine, the dirt, the rain, the love.”

There is no rhyme or reason to it that Alessandra can divine, but suddenly there are tears streaming from her eyes, and then the tears turn to wracking sobs. She was wrong, all those years ago, declaiming to the JFAB Board, and now she knows it, and it’s too late.

Read the rest of Episode 10 here.

Episode 8: The Many Uses of a Meat Mallet

Sheriff Tom decides

Excerpt

You may wonder why the islanders have an almost verbatim transcript of the confession carried around in their heads, or why there are some variations on the theme. For instance, some people assert Gloria went into detail here about Seamus’s sexual prowess; others say that’s hogwash—Gloria is too circumspect to reveal lurid details, and somewhere along the line someone must have padded the story.

As if it needed padding.

The answer to the question—how do the islanders know what Gloria said?— isn’t terribly interesting, but you might as well hear it, so you can focus on Gloria’s story.

After the arrest, Sheriff Tom carried Gloria’s confession in his heart and in his head until it felt like the words were strangling him, and one night, months later, when he’d had too much to drink (which is ironic, as you’ll soon see), he shared the story with Larry. The two men were sitting in Retha’s Bar and Grill. Retha and several others heard, and each of them told just one other person, someone they trusted to take the secret to his or her or their respective grave, and in very short order the entire island knew this part of Gloria’s history.

So now, many of the islanders are purveyors of the cautionary tale, and they tell it word for word, like the old oral histories.

Read the rest of the episode, and subscribe, here

Episode 6: Once More into the Fray

Larry has been hired by Katie Marchel to sue the Apple Cart Grocery for discrimination (Katie’s French, and Lauren makes her re-stock the French onion soup and the French fries . . . ) And then the call comes: the agency’s found a child for adoption.

And her name is Katie.

Read the rest of the episode, and subscribe to receive episodes by email twice weekly, here

Excerpt:

Larry goes to his study to draft a letter demanding that the Apple Cart Grocery cease and desist harassing his client, but of course he finds he cannot write such a letter, not to Lauren, she of the husky laugh that makes anyone nearby want to laugh too, even if it’s not clear what the joke is, who orders chocolate volcano cakes just for Larry, because she knows they’re his favorite.

. . .

Beatrix shoves his hand with her nose. You’re being ridiculous, she tells him.

“Once more into the fray,” he mutters.

And then he realizes he’s got it wrong. The Shakespearean quote is “Once more unto the breach.” From some forgotten dusty corner his brain dredges another, later part of the quote:

“Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage.”

Can he find hard-favour’d rage against his friend?

No, he cannot.

And then he remembers “Once more into the fray” is actually a quote from the movie, The Grey. The movie where everyone dies in the end.

So much for the value of perseverance.

Episode 5: Once More into the Fray

Image by Natalia Tench from Getty Images (text added)

Can Larry make peace with his role as the island’s only attorney, to support Ruth’s dream of adopting a child? Mind-reading, retired-greyhound Beatrix can help.

Read Episode 5, and subscribe to receive episodes twice weekly here.

Excerpt:

“You realize it may be difficult, at your age, to keep up with a child,” Janet says, and it is obvious that she’s said it so many times she no longer recognizes how crude the words sound, how the arrow of her words pierces the tender, vulnerable places guarded by Ego and Id.

“I’m pretty spry for sixty-one,” Larry says with a grimace.

That’s a lie. His back hurts, his legs are weak and spindly, his cholesterol level is high and he’s occasionally borderline anemic. Larry is all angles and prematurely stiff joints, his only claim to health that he is not overweight, but he’s become used to massaging the truth until he can state it as he wants to, with only the slightest twinge of conscience.

He says it again, for good measure: “I’m pretty spry.”

“We’re confident we can handle it,” Ruth says, serenity sitting as softly on her shoulders as a worn and comfortable shawl.

It works like Jedi mind-control. Janet writes “pretty spry” and “confident they can handle it” on a notepad, and then she says, “Well, I don’t see any reason you shouldn’t be approved. And since you’re willing to consider older children, I imagine you’ll hear from us fairly soon. Within six months, I think.”

“And we have a dog,” Larry says, belatedly, though he can’t tell whether he thinks that’s a factor in their favor, or whether he’s pleading with his wife to decide Beatrix is enough. “She’s a greyhound,” he adds. “Her name is Beatrix,” and then he closes his mouth with a snap, to keep more words from running out.

“A case worker will be in touch to make sure the dog is appropriate,” Janet says.

Larry and Ruth exchange glances, knowing the reality is that Beatrix will be the one evaluating the situation, not the other way around, knowing that it won’t do to say so, lest the inimitable Janet think they are senile as well as merely old.

Musings #1

I promised you distraction from reality, and Musings #1 brings us back to reality with a thud—Anne of Green Gables reference intentional. These ponderings are “story-adjacent,” so feel free to ignore if you just want the promised distraction. The next episode will land as scheduled, bringing us back to the imaginary world of Looser Island.

WHO LAUGHS LAST is, and is intended to be, fanciful, not based in reality or even intended to be realistic.

(I mean, really, who ever heard of a mind-reading dog? Well, except for my dog. Obviously.)

The story of “Paulo,” in particular, is romanticized fantasy.

First, it is unlikely there is a community anywhere in the world, no matter how small and insular, where an immigrant would be unequivocally and universally welcomed.

Humanity’s penchant for war and political upheaval, natural disasters, food scarcity, the longing for freedom, and the survival instinct always have and always will lead to emigration from one place to another in search of safety, in search of a land where “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are sacred.

Also, where there are refugees there will be opportunists, human traffickers trading on refugees’ dreams, and people who see borders as a business opportunity for smuggling drugs and other goods. This, too, is a tale as old as time.[i]

As a result, communities overwhelmed with large groups of immigrants, or communities struggling with violence perpetrated by (among others) human traffickers, drug smugglers, and imported gangs will always feel conflicted about whether or how far to extend a welcome to immigrants.

Another not-credible aspect of Paulo’s story: it is extremely unlikely anyone could escape the ICEcapades of 2025.

As I mentioned in the Disclaimer, WHO LAUGHS LAST was first written over twenty years ago. I won’t claim the story was more credible then, or that twenty years ago we lived in a kinder, gentler world. But it was at least a world where people in the United States weren’t in danger of being kidnapped off the street by masked government agents and summarily shipped to a prison in another country where torture is allegedly on the Daily Activities Calendar, and from which there is no release. Ever.[ii]

So as you read WHO LAUGHS LAST, please remember that it is fiction, and intended to be mostly lighthearted fiction at that.

In any event, as you read later episodes you’ll realize WHO LAUGHS LAST isn’t really Paulo’s story at all. It’s the story of Jim’s crush, and old Jens Jensen’s loneliness, and Larry feeling stuck in a combative role he never really wanted, and Alessandra’s childish conviction that everywhere is better than home, how Cherry became the unofficial island Siren, the griefs that bind Lauren and Gloria, Sheriff Tom’s one wild moment of rebellion. Etcetera. Paulo’s arrival, and sudden departure, is a catalyst for many of the changes the other characters experience, but he himself hardly comes into the remaining episodes.

(In art as in reality, the poor and the powerless get only bit parts on the stage of life. To be clear, that doesn’t make it okay, in art or in life, but as a white, born-in-America writer, I am not qualified to tell stories about what it feels like to be an immigrant, so this book is not “about” Paulo.)

One more point: I want to respond to readers who are upset that Paulo was depicted as (a) migrating simply for economic opportunity, not fleeing horrific violence and/or (b) stealing from the woman who generously gave him a job.

On the first question, I personally know people who have fled their homes because of horrific violence; I wanted to portray a less extreme (but no less common) story.

On both questions, I offer this.

One of the things that often gets lost in the rhetoric—where one side says all immigrants are “murderers and rapists” and the other side suggests all immigrants are saints—is what most of us non-politicians know: immigrants are just people. Some are extraordinarily kind and hard-working. Some are vicious. Some are fleeing unimaginably desperate conditions, while others are simply seeking a better life for themselves and their families. Some have gone through the often years’ long process of obtaining documentation to live in the United States; some emigrate without legal authority (often at great financial cost and physical danger). There are few saints, and fewer demons. Most, like you and me and everyone else, are occasionally selfish, lazy, irritable, dishonest.

Human.

Obviously, I was not trying to portray Paulo as a hardened criminal, but some may still object to the idea that he would have committed theft at all. [iii] To that I say: faced with imminent arrest and detention for an indefinite period of time in abjectly miserable conditions [iv], with no money of your own and cash on a shelf in front of you, are you completely certain you wouldn’t take the cash, scribble an apology on the wall, and tell yourself you’d pay it back someday, somehow?

FOOTNOTES AND CITATIONS

[i] “Man’s inhumanity to man” (Robert Burns) is not new. For an interesting article on street gang violence in ancient Rome, see Gang Violence in the Late Roman Republic by Jeffrey Tatum (Cambridge University Press March 13, 2020) (edited by Garrett G. Fagan, Linda Fibiger, Mark Hudson, and Matthew Trundle), available here https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-world-history-of-violence/gang-violence-in-the-late-roman-republic/96CED83F2809A92747F1851032F1E7A6

And for a Wikipedia description of human trafficking in ancient Greece check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Greece#:~:text=The%20principal%20centres%20of%20the,were%20sold%20by%20their%20parents.

Also not new: America’s history of encouraging immigration (or forcing immigration i.e. slavery) to provide cheap labor, and then turning on the immigrants. It is a shameful story that's been repeated ad nauseum. For just one example, consider the brutality toward Chinese immigrants in the late 1800s https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-forgotten-history-of-the-purging-of-chinese-from-america. (And of course there is the fact that much of that was occurring simultaneously with the horrors visited on Black people during the Reconstruction Era.)

[ii] By now we’ve all seen the stories of the man who was deported to CECOT “due to an administrative error.” https://www.npr.org/2025/04/01/nx-s1-5347427/maryland-el-salvador-error. And there is evidence he wasn’t the only one who was detained and then deported without cause, and without any opportunity to prove his innocence.

For information on the conditions in CECOT, where the US is shipping immigrants without regard to whether they’ve committed any crimes and without regard to whether they are legally in the US, see https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250128-no-way-out-grim-conditions-in-el-salvador-s-mega-prison-for-gangs

[iii] To those who claim our nation is suffering from a wave of immigrant-perpetrated crime, note that every study I’ve seen has pointed to some version of this conclusion:

“A crucial fact in contrast with the ramped up immigration enforcement over the last two decades is that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than similar US natives. This is not to say that immigrants never commit crimes. But the evidence is clear that they are not more likely to do so than US natives. In the face of such evidence, policies aimed at reducing the number of immigrants, including unauthorized immigrants, seem unlikely to reduce crime and increase public safety.”

From the synopsis of Do Immigrants Threaten US Public Safety? by Pia Orrenius and Madeline Zavodny (Center for Growth and Opportunity at the Utah State University July 2, 2019), available here https://cmsny.org/publications/jmhs-orrenius-zavodny-070219/

I know people living in or near border towns, and nothing in this Musings #1 is intended to dismiss their lived experiences or their concerns. As I said earlier, “man’s inhumanity to man” is not new.

[iv] Though the current situation is so much worse than it was twenty years ago, inhumane conditions in ICE detention centers in the US are also not new, especially since the government started contracting with private companies to house detainees. As with so many things, profit is not a great incentive for compassion, and conditions at these privately-run detention centers showcase how easily we dehumanize and then justify abusing immigrants. https://immigrantjustice.org/research-items/policy-brief-snapshot-ice-detention-inhumane-conditions-and-alarming-expansion

Prologue

Image from Unsplash by Hannah Lim @hannah15198

Beginnings, Middles, and Ends

Every day in the whole of human history can be seen, in retrospect, as the beginning of Something, the occurrence of some event that will result in the avalanche of events that form the complete story in the as-yet-unimagined future.

Some chapters unfold gently, like a mother’s kiss on a sleeping child’s forehead. Others descend mercilessly, like the slash of a vengeful deity’s sword.

On the day this story had its inception, none of the human inhabitants of Looser Island was aware of the threads of fate converging on this tiny island in the Salish Sea, the sequence of events that would start with the discovery of a man hiding in a dumpster, would lead almost but not quite inexorably to another man’s death, and would ultimately touch each and every one of the islanders irrevocably. None of the islanders realized their reality, so predictable in its casual chaos, was about to be thrown off kilter forever.

It’s possible the dogs knew.

Introducing a Dog Named Rambo and an Island Named Looser

Episode One available here on May 3, 2025

Image by Anna Dudkova from Unsplash