18. Grant
EIGHTEEN
GRANT
The memory that always finds me when I'm trying not to think is not the prison years.
It's not the courtroom.
It's not the specific day, the day I'd rather not name, the floor I'd rather not describe, when I reached the absolute bottom of the post-prison years and had to choose between going on and not going on.
The memory that finds me is quieter than any of those.
July. Dark fairgrounds. Jessika Mills on the other side of her sleeping brother, looking at me with her intelligent dark eyes and no defense up, just honest, and me looking back with everything I'd been keeping carefully managed sitting right there at the surface.
I was twenty-one and I knew two things: that she was the most real person I had ever been in a room with, and that the right thing to do was leave her alone.
I was twenty-one and Jessika was nineteen and she was going to go to college and become what she was clearly going to become and I was going to stay in Briar County and be what I was clearly going to be, and those two trajectories had no intersection that ended well for her.
Doesn't matter, I told her.
I meant: she mattered too much to put at risk.
She didn't understand that. I couldn't explain it.
I was young and I'd never been good at saying true things to people directly, I was better at fighting and working and the particular loud silence of being present without explaining myself, and so it came out as doesn't matter and she heard indifference.
Two months later she was testifying against me and I convinced myself she understood me perfectly.
It took four years in prison and two more in recovery before I could see it clearly enough to stop being angry about it.
She didn't know, she was young too. She told the truth as she understood it.
That's the part that cost the most, actually. Not that she testified. That she was trying to do the right thing and I couldn't even give her that much credit for almost a decade.
She made a mistake.
I made the mistake of thinking mistakes were the same as betrayal.
I think about this sometimes when I can't sleep. Whether I would have been different, would have made different choices, run a different road, if the Jessika situation had gone differently. If she'd understood. If I'd been able to say what I meant. If the summer had ended otherwise.
Maybe. Maybe not. I had other factors working against me and most of them were inside me, not outside.
But I think about it.
I think about it more, lately, than I have in years.
Eli comes to me again in the worst way, which is to say he comes looking for trouble and finds me instead.
I'm at the garage at seven PM on a Thursday, later than I meant to stay, finishing up the Mustang's carburetor work, when my phone rings with a number I don't recognize. I almost ignore it. Something makes me answer.
"Grant?" Young voice. Trying to sound steady.
I straighten. "Who is this?"
"It's Eli." A pause. "I need—I need you to come somewhere. I messed something up."
My nephew is young, who has his own particular history of messing things up, the one who learned early that I was there on different terms, but when Eli showed up at the garage three months ago, needing a place to land, I couldn't send him away.
He reminds me of myself at seventeen in all the ways I can't afford to ignore.
"Tell me where," I say.
He's at the back of the parking lot behind Murphy's Bar, a place he has no business being at seventeen, in the company of three people who have the specific look of people I should have avoided at twenty.
Two men and a woman, older than Eli, one of the men with the contained, coiled energy of someone who's used to getting what he wants through proximity and implication.
When I pull in and the headlights sweep across the group, the man with the coiled energy turns toward me.
I know his face. Troy Sable. He did a stretch in Whitmore County for distribution. I know his history the way you know dangerous things, not because I sought out the information but because information about certain people accumulates whether you want it to or not.
Eli is standing slightly to the side of the group with the particular posture of someone who has just realized they've walked into a situation they don't know how to get out of.
I get out of the truck.
"Eli," I say. "Get in."
"Grant, I?—"
"Get in the truck."
He moves toward me. Sable steps slightly to intercept, not aggressive, not yet, just claiming space.
"Friend of yours?" Sable says. His voice is pleasant.
"My nephew." I look at him directly. "We're leaving."
Sable smiles. Easy. Rehearsed. The smile of someone who has learned that a smile before the confrontation reads as confidence. "Eli owes some of us a conversation."
"That conversation is over."
"That's interesting." Sable tilts his head. "Because from where I'm standing, it's just beginning."
I look at him steadily.
This is the moment, I know this moment, I've been in it enough times, when it goes one way or the other.
The man in front of me is assessing whether I'm someone he should push or someone he should give ground to, and he's very good at that calculation, and the answer depends almost entirely on whether I mean what I'm saying.
I mean it.
"Eli," I say, without looking away from Sable. "Truck. Now."
Eli moves.
Sable's calculation completes. He looks at me for a moment longer, then steps back.
"This is a small county," he says.
"Yes," I agree. "It is."
I put Eli in the truck and we drive.
For three blocks, neither of us speaks. Eli is staring at the dashboard with his jaw set and his shoulders tight, and I drive and let him work through whatever he's working through.
"Stupid," I say finally.
"I know."
"You know what his sheet looks like?"
"No."
"Two distribution charges. One aggravated robbery. He does this for a living, Eli." I keep my voice level. This isn't the time for anger, anger pushes defensive people deeper in. "He wasn't having a friendly conversation with you."
"He said he had something I could do for money."
"He said that to everyone in that parking lot at some point."
Eli is quiet. He's thin the way adolescents are thin, that unfinished quality, height without substance, arms too long for his torso.
He got the dark hair but his mother's eyes, pale gray, and right now those eyes are doing the particular thing teenage eyes do when they're trying not to let you know how scared they are.
"Was he going to hurt me?" he asks.
I consider the honest answer. "Not tonight. He wasn't at that stage."
"But eventually."
"Eli. Men like that don't do favors. The thing they want from you costs more than you have to give."
He nods. Stares at the road.
"How long has he been talking to you?" I ask.
"Three weeks. He came into Murphy's when I was there with some guys from school. Started buying rounds. Seemed—" He stops. "He seemed okay."
"He's very good at seeming okay."
"I know that now."
I drive for another block.
"You're going to hear from him again," I say. "He's not going to let one missed night stop him."
"What do I do?"
"You tell me immediately." I glance over. "Every time. Whatever he says, whatever he offers, whatever excuse he gives for why you should meet him somewhere. You tell me first."
Eli looks at me. "What are you going to do?"
"Handle it."
"Handle it how?"
"That depends on him."
A pause.
"Grant," Eli says quietly. "Are you going to get in trouble because of me?"
This kid.
"I'm going to make sure you don't get in trouble because of him," I say. "That's the direction I'm focused on."
He's quiet for a long moment.
"Dad never—" He starts and stops. Restarts. "My dad never handled anything. He’d just disappear. Or he'd get angry and make it worse."
"I know."
"You're not like him." It comes out awkward. Young.
I look at the road.
"Different choices," I say. "Different paths. That's all that is."
"You make it sound simple."
"It's the simplest complicated thing there is." I pause. "You can always choose. Even when everything is against you, you can choose. That's the only thing I know for certain."
Eli leans his head against the window.
Three days later I have a direct conversation with Troy Sable that is very brief and very specific and involves me making clear, without ambiguity, the nature of the consequences if he approaches my nephew again.
He doesn't push back.
Men who push back are dangerous. Men who decide not to are just calculating odds.
I know, after that conversation, that we're not done. That this is a thread connected to something bigger. That Sable is working for someone, and that someone is still operating in this county.
I called Jessika, and without hesitation, she invited me over.
By the time I pulled into her driveway, the sun had long disappeared, leaving the evening wrapped in darkness.
What surprised me was seeing her already standing in the doorway before I even climbed out of the truck, like she'd been waiting for me.
Something about that simple sight settled a part of me I hadn't realized was restless.
We spent the next few hours sitting in her living room, talking about everything and nothing at the same time.
The conversation flowed naturally, bouncing from serious topics to ridiculous stories that had us both laughing.
I needed that more than I wanted to admit.
Intelligent conversation wasn't something I came across very often these days.
Most people either knew my reputation or my past. Jessika seemed interested in the person sitting in front of her.
For a while, I almost forgot about everything else.
Then a faint creak echoed from somewhere upstairs.
Both of us glanced toward the ceiling.
Another soft sound followed, like someone shifting their weight on the staircase before retreating.
I chuckled under my breath. "Either Nova or Presley," I said.
The house fell quiet again, whoever it was apparently deciding they'd heard enough before heading back upstairs.