Forty-One
I PICK UP the parsnips, as ordered, and then walk with Taylor while she finishes her own shopping.
“How’s your work in the kitchen these days, if I’m allowed to ask?”
“It remains a work in progress,” she says.
“Is Burt happy with it?”
“Ecstatic.”
“Ignorance is still bliss, then.”
“Hey,” she says. “Which arm can I punch?”
When we’ve both checked out, we walk out of Local Harvest and find a secluded spot in Corley Park, a bench tucked away in a corner and mostly hidden by trees, enough that no one will bother us. That’s my hope, anyway.
There’s never been a time in my life, even when I was too young to know any better, when I wasn’t happy to hang with Taylor, my best friend when she was a girl and my best friend now. So many changes in my life. Not that.
“Burt told me what happened to you,” she says. “And to Bumper.”
She’s wearing a powder-blue T-shirt and white jeans and sandals.
“Just told Sheriff Hader all about it,” I say. “Sparing no details.”
“He’s probably already made an arrest,” Tay says.
It gets a smile out of me. “Didn’t you once tell me that sarcasm is a weapon of the weak?”
“Not when you’re talking about someone who’s weak as shit the way Hader is,” she says.
“I remember telling my grandma one time that I used to hear almost as much salty language from you as I did in locker rooms.”
“Fucking liar,” she says, and we both laugh.
We sit and look out at the great, wide green expanse of the park.
In the distance we can see people with dogs on the walking trails, past the kids’ playground.
There are people stretched out on blankets, reading or just lying on their backs in the midday sun.
Taken as a whole, the whole picture, it’s like some snapshot of sweet North Cackalacky on a summer day.
Except that there are people dying around here because of drugs, and girls are disappearing, and some thugs showed up at my house and I caught the kind of beating I did until Roof Crockett, whatever his reasons were, had called it off.
“By the way, and for the record,” I say. “I’m not going to get myself killed.” I shrug. “If they wanted to get it done last night, one of them did have a gun on him.”
“But what about next time, Silas?” she asks. “What if next time you don’t even get the chance to fight back?”
“Then I go to plan B.”
“And what would that be, exactly?”
“That remains a work in progress.”
“This isn’t funny,” she says. She turns to face me on the bench. “I don’t want you to end up like your dad.”
“You think the Crocketts might have had something to do with that?”
“Not what I’m saying,” she says. “Though I’d be lying if I said the thought hasn’t ever occurred to me, and you’d be lying right back if you said the same damn thing.
All I know for sure is that the evil in this world got him killed, the way evil came looking for you last night.
” She sighs. “I’d just die if what happened to your dad happened to you. ”
“It won’t happen to me.”
“This isn’t football.”
It gets another smile out of me. “Funny,” I say. “Briar Crockett told me the same thing.”
“Well,” she says, “on this one point we both happen to be right.”
I sit and stare out at the park all over again. Way on the other side of the green, I see a dog chasing a Frisbee and then jumping to catch it, and I wonder if Bumper, who’s still healing up from that broken leg, will be able to do that ever again.
I draw in some air and then let it out.
“You’ll understand what I’m about to tell you because you might be the only person in the world who might,” I say.
“Not sure that even I understand, at least not completely. But I’ve got this need to be what I was when I was still playing football.
Got it and can’t shake it no matter how hard I try. ”
She waits.
“I want to be the one who decides how it all comes out,” I say. “And not in some softball game. Or helping Charlie Hall lay down crop.”
“I do understand that, because I understand you,” she says. “But you can’t clean up the whole town all by yourself, no matter how good or honorable your intentions are. No one man can do that. If he could, my husband would have done it by now.”
“But I’ve got to do something, Tay,” I say. “I can’t sit this out, not with the drugs and not with those missing girls, at least not while I’m still around. Not with Briar Crockett and his boys ruling the roost the way they do.”
“You working on a plan B about that, too?”
“In progress.”
“At least promise me this,” she says, her pretty face solemn and serious. “Promise me you won’t just go looking for trouble.”
“You ever say that to Burt?”
“Burt’s a policeman,” she says, “not a quarterback. And for your information, I tell him that every time he’s about to leave our house.”
There’s more urgency in her voice when she says, “Promise?”
“Promise.”
We sit in silence for a few minutes until I finally say, “You happy with the way things turned out for you, Tay? With your life, I mean.”
“Better be,” she says. “Only life I’ve got.”
“Is that an answer?”
“Best I’ve got.”
She stands and tells me that she’s still got shopping to do today, over at the butcher shop. She’s promised Burt a big, fat rib eye for dinner, after the drink they might even meet up for once he finishes work.
I’m still on the bench, not quite ready to leave, or to let go of this time with her.
She looks down at me then, as if looking all the way into me one more time.
“What?” she asks.
I wait before I answer.
“Say hi to Burt.”