Chapter Seven
Caleb
I didn’t know why I told Mira my sister had picked out the shirt for her.
I had spent an hour at Beall’s trying to figure out which shirt to get.
I’d never cared about women’s fashion before, but I was torn between getting something nice for her and getting something she would accept.
If I thought I had an icicle’s chance in hell of buying her more clothes and her actually letting me, I’d have done it and not thought twice.
She had an empty closet going into a relentless winter.
She had a need, and I wanted to fill it.
Like with the fish I couldn’t help dropping at her door every time I changed.
My instincts were only getting stronger, and thinking about taking care of Mira kept my animal side under control.
Eli hadn’t had anyone to balance him out, no one to keep him accountable or give him a job that kept his animal focused.
That’s why the old man had snapped, and I was going to do everything in my power to deter that fate for myself.
And right now, taking care of Mira’s needs was what was keeping me sane.
As astonishing as my lie was about my sister picking out the shirt, it had given me an idea.
Not a complete one, just the beginnings of a niggling at the edge of my brain that said I could do something about something.
I’d have to explore it more later when Mira wasn’t sitting in the cab of my truck, fiddling with the radio.
An oldies station blared out the second chorus of “Eight Days a Week,” and she leaned back in the passenger’s seat with a sigh.
She looked small and frail, cowering on the corner of the bench seat of my truck.
Even with her choice in music, she still seemed uncomfortable and trapped.
Like a raccoon in a cage. It was probably me making her feel uncomfortable.
People in town had started acting differently around me, too.
More wary. I blamed it on the bear residing under my skin.
I rolled down the windows and hoped it would help.
We parked in front of Sam Burns’s office near the end of Main Street. “I’ll wait out here,” I told her as she escaped the truck and shut the door gingerly behind her.
Mira turned and placed her hands gently over the window opening. “Okay, I’ll be right back.”
I opened my mouth to tell her she didn’t have to worry about being gentle with my ride.
It was only a work truck, but she turned and scampered into Burns’s office before I could get a word out.
It wouldn’t have mattered, anyway. If she wasn’t comfortable with something, she wouldn’t want to risk leaving any evidence she had ever been there.
I didn’t know how I knew that, but I did.
Two older ladies sat in rocking chairs outside of the handmade furniture shop beside the lawyer’s office. I gave them a two-fingered wave out the window. “How are you doing today, ladies?”
“Caleb McCreedy. Lands alive, is that you?” Mrs. Brendel asked. She used to teach me in Sunday school when I was little.
The chair creaked rhythmically beneath her as she rocked, and the motion lulled me to relax despite my earlier tension.
“Yes ma’am, in town for some errands.”
The other woman looked back to the door of Mr. Burns’s office. I recognized her, too, but couldn’t put a name to her face. “Is my eyesight failing or was that Mira Fletcher I just saw get out of your truck?” the woman asked.
I groaned internally. “Yes ma’am,” was all I said.
“Hmph,” the women said in unison.
After a moment of staring at the door Mira had disappeared into, the quieter one said, “Caleb McCreedy, you be careful with that one. You are a prominent figure in this town.”
How was I supposed to respond to that? I wanted to tell her my father was the prominent member in town.
I was just a member. But most of all, I wanted the tell her to advise me again after she’d had an actual conversation with Mira.
Instead, I said, “Y’all have a nice day,” then rolled up my window to deter any more unsolicited life advice.
And so we sat, an awkward trio of semi-strangers watching the same door for the same unsuspecting girl to appear.
I couldn’t help but notice when the women’s heads tipped together like a little pyramid of gossip as they whispered. For some reason, it really bothered me.
Maybe I was going crazy. A month and a half ago, I wouldn’t have given another thought to some old ladies gossiping about Mira Fletcher.
Everybody did it. So what? There wasn’t much to talk about in a small town, bar the goings on of its residents, and Mira was the most interesting person to talk about.
Maybe that was because people had been so creative with the stories they put out there about her over the years, or maybe because of the known truths about her sordid past that accompanied the rumors, but I was beginning to think that mostly it was because no one knew a single real thing about her.
The unknown scared people. It conjured gossip.
Maybe it was as simple as that for the townspeople, but it had consequences for Mira.
The door opened, and I sat up a little straighter. Whether it was because I was relieved to see her or because I was ready to drive the hell away from this awkward situation, I couldn’t tell.
I reached over and swung her door open for her, but Mira stopped when she saw something on the ground.
She bent over to pick it up. It was a penny someone had dropped.
The thought of that penny meaning so much to anyone put a raw feeling in my gut, but instead of pocketing it, Mira flipped it over neatly and replaced it in the exact spot she had found it.
“Why did you do that?” I asked as she climbed in and shut the door.
She stared at me in confusion.
“The penny. Why’d you flip the penny?”
“Oh,” she said. “It was on tails. It’s bad luck to pick one up on tails, so I flipped it to heads so someone else will have good luck.”
And that, I decided, wasn’t all I wanted to know about Mira Fletcher.
It was, however, all I needed to know.
****
“Why didn’t you tell me the favor you needed was for electric work on Crazy Mira’s land?” my brother, Brian, asked. He’d been grumbling since the moment we turned onto Dark Corner Road.
“Don’t call her that,” I said, shutting the door to my truck a little too soundly.
“What’s going on with you?” he demanded, slamming his own.
“Nothing’s going on.” I pulled two full plastic bags out of the bed of the truck and handed one to my sister, Sadey.
“Something’s going on,” Brian said.
“Just lay off, Brian. I asked for a favor and you said you would do it. If I would’ve known you were going to piss and moan so much, I would have just asked Drew to do it.”
“Drew is a lightning rod. My work is better.”
“Which is why I asked you. Plus, I didn’t think you were going to rag on me so much. You’re acting like Evan.” Low blow, but I was pissed with the twenty questions. “Don’t be that guy.”
He grabbed his tools, backpack, and huge duffle bag out of the back of the truck.
“No, it’s cool. I feel like hiking through a haunted forest on my only day off,” he said dramatically.
“Except this is the part in the horror films where the sidekick,” he said, pointing at himself, “disappears, only to be found nine scenes later hanging from a tree with his face eaten off.”
“What is wrong with you?” Sadey asked, shaking her head.
I could see the goose bumps on her arms from where I was standing.
“Finished?” I asked.
“No, I’m not. Do you like her?” He searched my face like it would hold the answer.
“Yeah, and you would too if you actually talked to her.”
“Not like that, Caleb. You know what I mean.”
I growled and rubbed my hands over my face before I unhooked the small gate to Mira’s property.
I couldn’t tell him what my real problem was, or what I’d become, but I’d be damned if I started lying to my family.
I’d give him as much as I could and hope it was enough.
“Look, Mira saved my life. And I don’t just mean saved it.
I mean she used up every last ounce of energy she had in her body to drag my carcass up to her house.
She probably hadn’t eaten in days. You didn’t see her lying there, passed out, because of the effort she had put into getting me on her horse.
Her stomach was rumbling so loud I thought it was the damned grizzly back to finish me off.
She’s young, scared, has no family, has been through God-knows-what and she was still cool with standing over a stranger and shooting a bear.
” I stopped walking and turned on Brian who was following quietly behind Sadey.
“Do you know how many hours I was out there with that grizzly? Thirteen hours, and most of that time in the pitch black. Think about that, Brian. It was playing with me. Letting me bleed out slowly like it was punishing me. If I moved to try and save myself, it swatted me down like I was nothing and went back to eating my horse. I could hear him crunching its bones, knowing that it would be me next. It would leave for hours only to come back again and again, and each time I thought this is it. He’s going to kill me now.
And a part of me was relieved by the end because it hurt so damned bad, I was ready. I owe her.”
“That’s not what I asked,” Brian said quietly.
I puffed air out of my cheeks and started walking again. He wouldn’t get an answer from me. I didn’t even understand the reasons I was here.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone what it was like?” Sadey asked. “You never talk about it. That stuff is poison in your mind, Caleb. You have to get it out.”
Of course Sadey would think that way. She was so like my mother had been. She thought talking about problems solved problems.