Chapter 7 – GLENNA #5
Granger responds by turning his attention to Cash. I can’t help but laugh. Granger leaves none of your dignity intact, and he’s a slobberer.
“Does he need to eat?” I ask.
“You’d think so by how he’s goin’ after us, but no, I fed him before we came. He just doesn’t like it here. I think the horses throw him off.” Cash goes to one knee and gives Granger lots of love. They’re so delighted with each other.
My tension ebbs. “Do we have to go back in there? Your mother hates me.”
“She hates that Aunt Lil’s going through a hard time, so she’s being a bitch to you. I’ll talk to her.”
“I’m sorry that Miss Lil is sick.” I don’t want anyone to be hurt. Maybe I should have tried harder to talk my dad out of writing the article. Who got hurt ‘cause of what Del Willis was doing, really? The vehicles were surplus.
“I know.” Cash rises back to his feet. Granger has calmed down some. Now he’s loping off to investigate a bush. “None if it’s on you, you know? If Del played fast and loose with the paperwork or whatever, that’s on him. And I know you didn’t write that shit.”
Hold on. What?
Cash laughs at me and playfully pulls a lock of my hair. “We were in English together for years. You can’t write any better than I can.”
I close my mouth.
Literally, no one else has guessed it wasn’t me. Even Toby thinks I wrote the article. He was pissed. He had this theory that I wanted to bust out of my shell, change my reputation, and get likes or something, so I had my dad help me write it.
He kept on me about how if I wanted to level up, I should apply to art school in Pyle. I shouldn’t mess with a genuinely good guy who gave him a ride home when he got pulled over drunk coming back from a gig in Shady Gap—and let him keep the bag of weed he had in his pocket.
I didn’t intend to keep the truth from Toby.
Putting my name on the article was an impulse decision.
But when I showed him a copy, and he lost his shit, I thought if I turned around and said I didn’t write it, I’d come out looking like a liar, and that was worse than looking like an asshole.
This wasn’t long before the end, and I was already walking on pins and needles.
“Don’t tell anyone,” I say to Cash.
“I won’t.” He gestures towards the woods. “Wanna go for a walk?”
“Okay.”
The further from the Wall family, the better.
Cash leads the way around the fence that blocks off the pool and outdoor kitchen. There’s a long lawn, perfectly manicured with stripes like a baseball outfield, and then there’s Dina’s treehouse and the woods.
It’s early evening, so the shadows are lengthening, but it’s still broad daylight. The crickets haven’t started yet.
Granger bounds in front of us, ears flopping, until he gets several yards ahead. Then he turns and barks, and when we don’t hurry, he bounds back and weaves between us, snuffling and butting our hands until we give him scratches.
“You were protecting your dad, right?” Cash breaks the silence.
“Yeah. The town was gonna come after him with pitchforks.”
“So they came after you instead.”
“I can handle it.” I make a muscle. “I’m tough.”
He squeezes my upper arm, and my tummy tingles.
“Whoa. How’d you get these guns?”
I have slender arms, but I do have some biceps. “Shlepping stuff at work.” It’s the truth. I don’t work out except for hiking.
“What about you?” I nod at his arms.
“What? These?” He actually stops in his tracks and poses like a bodybuilder. His muscles strain the seams of his shirt.
I swallow, and it kind of gets stuck in my throat, so I hack.
He laughs, delighted. “Wanna touch?”
“Pass.”
I keep walking. He quits messing around to stay in step with me.
“These days, mostly chopping wood and working on my house.”
“What house?” I thought he lived in an apartment.
“I’m building a log cabin on the east face.”
“On the mountain?”
A sliver of jealousy twinges in my chest.
“Yup. I got twelves acres. The river runs through.”
“A hunting cabin?”
“No. I’m gonna live up there. It’s got three bedrooms, one and a half baths.”
“Electricity?”
“Yeah, Glenna. My house is gonna have electric.”
My cheeks heat. “You’re helping to build it?”
“I’m building it myself.” He’s always so arrogant, but for once, he actually seems bashful. “Well, Brice helps, but mostly he watches and whittles and tells me what I’m doing wrong.”
“Don’t the Carrolls live up there?”
“Yeah, they’re my neighbors to the north. That’s how I knew when the property went up for sale.”
“And you’re gonna live up there all the time?”
“Yeah. Run my hunting guide business out of there. Maybe eventually build some kind of lodge. I don’t know. I got plans, but you know, gotta finish my house first.”
I can’t imagine Cash Wall living alone as a mountain man.
“What?” he asks.
“It’s just—you’re really into people.”
He smiles, but it’s restrained. Almost tired. “I don’t actually like people all that much, Glenna. People like me. Except you.” His lips curve higher, dimpling at the corners, and there’s a warmth to it now. “You don’t like me.”
I roll my eyes. “For obvious reasons.”
“For obvious reasons,” he repeats, and then he sighs. “I’m a Wall, right? I got a responsibility to the town.”
“To party and bro it up?”
“To be what people want me to be. What makes ‘em happy. We all have our role to play, right?”
We’ve reached the end of the lawn where Dina’s treehouse surrounds a massive maple.
It’s every kid’s dream. Stairs lead to a wraparound porch.
The treehouse has glass windows and shutters that open and shut.
The door has a latch. The roof is steep-pitched and shingled.
Fancy trim along the eaves makes it look straight out of a fairy tale.
Dina and I spent many summer afternoons inside, reading or drawing side-by-side on bean bag chairs inside in front of a box fan. It has overhead lights and electricity.
Cash and I stare up at it. It’s been painted recently. It’s still the prettiest playhouse you can imagine.
“Want to see my treehouse?” Cash asks.
“Okay.”
I’m kind of expecting him to lead me up the stairs in front of us, but instead, he takes off along the tree line. I follow until we come to a worn trail. It’s narrow and overgrown in places. Cash goes first, beating back sticker bushes with a branch he picks up off the ground.
“Poison ivy.” He points at a clump growing beside the path.
“Okay. Hold up. Lemme roll in it.”
“Smart ass.”
“Poison oak.” I point out a few yards later.
“So we’re playing this game?”
“What game?”
He pokes his stick at a plant with green leaves and blue berries. “Blue cohosh.”
I bend and snag a piece of ground cover with small leaves and a purple stem. I hold it up. “Spurge.”
“That’s really what it’s called?”
“Google it if you don’t believe me.”
He takes out his phone. “What did you say? Spooge?”
“Spurge.”
He taps. “Huh. Did you know it’s poisonous?”
“I did not.”
“It excretes a toxic, milky latex.”
“You don’t say.”
“Its Latin name is Euphorbia. Did you know that?”
“I did not.”
“We should name our first girl Euphorbia.”
What? “Hell, no.”
“Okay, but you can explain to her why we named her Spurge when she comes home crying from school.”
“You’re not funny.” I mash my lips together.
“For someone who can identify spurge in the wild, you know shit all about it.” Cash shakes his head as he slips his phone in his pocket.
“You can’t act like a know-it-all if you’re reading off Wikipedia.”
“It was the Google results page.” He points to a bird gliding way above the treetops. It’s so far away, it’s almost a speck. “Peregrine falcon.”
“You cannot possibly call that from this distance. It could be a merlin. Could be a northern goshawk. Could be any kind of hawk.”
“I am so hard for you right now,” he tosses over his shoulder.
Oh.
Uh.
“Don’t change the subject. I’m right.”
The bird caws and swoops, sailing close enough that I can make out the black in its blue coloring. It’s a peregrine falcon.
“Tell me I was right, Glenna. Make me even harder.”
I huff and focus on my feet. The trail is winding up a steep incline, densely wooded.
I spot maple, beech, red oak, white ash, and black cherry.
It’s gotten darker, and there’s a stillness as the diurnal critters wind down from their day, but the nocturnal animals aren’t wide awake quite yet.
Granger pads quietly beside me, respecting the quiet.
I don’t tell Cash he was right.
We get to the top of the incline, and Cash leaves the path.
I follow. There’s a very narrow trail, not much more than a rut.
It leads to a thick and tall oak with a split trunk.
There are boards nailed into the side as a ladder, and about fifteen feet in the air, there’s a platform on two-by-eight supports bolted into the tree. No railing.
It’s clearly been here awhile, but there’s a sturdiness to it. The bolts are big, and the lumber must be pressure treated because it doesn’t show much wear.
It’s really high up.
“You built this?”
“Yeah.”
“With your dad?”
“By myself.” He pauses a second and kicks the ground with the toe of his boot. “Bill the barn manager helped a little. Dad and Kell and John and Grandpa Price were busy building Dina’s. I got butthurt. Bill found me beating on a fence with a stick. He said why don’t you build your own. So I did.”
I remember the summer when Dina got her treehouse. It was after fourth grade.
“Is it still safe?”
“Yeah. I go up every so often and check it out. Wanna see my treehouse, Glenna Dobbs?”
Nerves spark in my belly. I kind of do. It’s gonna be tricky climbing the ladder one-armed, but I can probably manage it.
“How come I didn’t know this was here?” I test the first step with my boot. Seems sturdy enough.
“No girls allowed. You know the rules.” Cash gives Granger some loving, and then he commands, “Stay.”
I rise up on my toes and grab the step above my head. The edges go past the trunk so I’m able to get a decent grip. I take another step up. Here goes nothing.