Chapter 40
FORTY
Davis
Waking up in my old room feels weird; it’s still set up in here like eighteen-year-old Davis lives in this room, minus the stock of condoms and skin mags.
All of my posters are still up on the walls, a few of my old roper boots are still in the dark wood armoire at the corner of the room, and the huge stereo I blew the speakers out of still sits on the floor next to it.
Place is a twenty-year-old time capsule.
I walk down the creaky stairs that Bill won’t let me have fixed, scratching at my bare chest while I listen to Sophia giggle in the kitchen.
When I round the corner, I see her sitting at the table with Martina, the stack of coloring books and boxes of crayons from Sophia’s birthday present laid out in front of them while Bill works at the stove.
When I told her Martina had gotten worse, she did more research on it than I did.
She pulled up article after article about what to say, how to act, activities to do with her to keep her grounded.
When I came to visit six months ago, Martina was still lucid most of the time and knew who we were and what year it was.
She could move on her own, use her hands better and was able to see more than five feet in front of her; but it’s already a lot worse than it was then.
So much of her mind has been eaten away by disease at this point, and her body is barely hanging on.
I regret not bringing Sophia with me sooner.
I think I’ll probably regret that for the rest of my life.
“Do I smell what I think I smell?”
“If ya think ya smell Bisquick and bird,” Bill answers.
Sophia’s eyes snap over to us, questioning. “What is that?”
“Fried chicken and waffles,” I tell her. “Breakfast of the gods.”
Within half an hour, the three of us have plates stacked high with delicious fucking food.
We sit together at the kitchen table that isn’t really meant for four adults to use, and I watch Sophia blend fucking perfectly into my family.
Bill dishes out attitude and she dishes it right back to him, catching him off guard, which is pretty damn hard to do.
She checks in on Martina every now and again, making sure she’s as included in the conversation as she wants to be or can be.
She even makes Martina laugh a few times.
I’m fucking in awe of her.
·
We spend most of the day with Martina, watching her live in a timeline that either happened a long time ago or never existed, only brought into reality for her via hallucination.
This is the woman who once chased a guy down the front porch, swinging a shovel at his head because he wouldn’t stop harassing her about buying her damn house.
This is the woman who, at fifty-seven years old with a bum knee and a sweet tea in one hand, beat paramedics to her kid’s wreck and pulled him out of a mangled car without any help.
Seeing her lose her strength, her voice, her memories...it makes my damn stomach hurt. I have all the money in the fucking world and all the power that comes with it, and I can’t do anything but sit here and watch her die.
And I’m too damn chicken to stick around for that part.
I give Martina a kiss on the head and pull her blanket back up over her lap before heading out to Bill’s truck with Sophia.
It’s a clunky old thing he’s had since long before I got here, and he refuses to trade it in or let me at least get him a backup in case this one goes belly up.
I tried once, and he damn near flew out just to yell at me.
‘I’ve had that truck longer than you’ve been alive, boy!’ He’d shouted at me through the phone. ‘You leave it the hell alone!’
The inside of the truck is full of all things Bill: a couple extra tins of dip, a police scanner he knows damn well he’s not supposed to have, a spare holster and one of those tree-shaped air fresheners that hang from the rearview mirror.
It’s about as worn as his favorite hat, so I don’t think it’s giving off any smell anymore.
The leather on the steering wheel and the seats looks like it’s been kept up well, not missing or worn in any patches.
“We rode the bull last night, so are we shooting tonight?” Sophia asks while she fidgets with the radio dials. “Knock out all of the exciting nightlife activities before we go?”
“I was gonna show you where all the cool kids go to make out,” I tell her. “But we can shoot.”
“How many girls have you taken to this mystery spot?”
I flick my gaze to her while I adjust the gear shift. “You really want me to answer that?”
“You little hussy,” she laughs.
She uses the crank on the inside of her door to bring her window down, letting the cool air outside fly in and whip at her hair. Her hand sticks out of the window, bobbing up and down while the air passes it.
We fly down the open road, the only people on it, for another few miles.
My old high school passes by, the grocery store I worked at for a week before I got fired for stealing beer and drinking it on the clock, the park I had my first real birthday party at.
I only lived in this town for six years, but it feels like my whole damn life passes by us.
I hook a sharp left onto a trail off the road, worn down with car tires over the years, and follow it for another ten minutes, and bring us to a stop at the center of a clearing.
“So this is Make-out Point, huh?” Sophia asks, unbuckling her seatbelt.
“We called it The Patch,” I laugh.
“Now there’s a name that makes you tingly all over.”
“Stay here,” I tell her with a pat to her leg.
I climb out of the truck and head toward the back, popping the tailgate open. Climbing up into the bed, I unroll the bundle of blankets waiting for me and lay them out in the truck bed, topping them off with a couple of pillows near the cab.
This is so fucking stupid.
This is some Colt Fowler shit.
I don’t know what possessed me to even think of this shit.
Flipping the lid of the cooler open, I hop back out of the bed toward Sophia’s window. I reach in past her and press the third button on the radio presets – the only one that isn’t Bill’s talk radio – and crank up the volume.
“Alright,” I tell her, “come on out.”
I open the door for her and she climbs out, moving toward the back of the truck. Honestly, I half expect her to laugh at me. I would laugh at me.
“Shut up,” she says with a slap to my chest, “this is so cute! Wait – is this what you did with all of the other girls you brought here?”
“Nah,” I chuckle. “I just felt them up in the front seat.”
“Then it’s cute.”
Hoisting her up by the ass, I help her climb into the truck bed and follow her up while she grabs a beer from the cooler. She twists off the cap and settles down into the blankets, bringing her knees up while I settle next to her with a beer of my own.
“The best part about this place is that it’s far enough from the city that nothing fucks with the sky at night,” I tell her, pulling her into my lap as the sky goes dark. “Crystal clear up there.”
Her body relaxes against mine while she looks up at the sky, watching the stars start to peek out above us.
It’s nice, sharing this place with her. Sure, I brought my fair share of girls here while I was in high school, but it was more than that.
This place means something to me. The first time I came out here was a month after Bill and Martina brought me home; they didn’t want a grown kid, they were planning for someone five and under.
Someone who hadn’t been damaged too bad just yet.
They definitely didn’t want a kid who couldn’t – or wouldn’t – talk.
But by those first weeks, after the first four tries at getting me into therapy, I could tell they actually gave a shit about me, and that scared me senseless.
I tossed the Walkman they gave me into my backpack with some extra batteries, threw on my headphones, and I fuckin’ bolted.
It took Bill a couple of hours to find me out here, and I thought for sure, he was gonna have a fit about it, but he didn’t.
Instead, he’d picked up a baseball bat from the bed of that old truck and took me over to a tree.
‘Ya ain’t gotta talk, boy,’ he told me, ‘but ya do gotta communicate with us.’ I spent two hours whacking the bat against the tree trunks before we finally went back to the house, and I came back any time I needed to blow off some steam after that.
Eventually, they knew when I told them I was coming to The Patch, I was either beating on the trees or bringing a girl out here, and they knew they weren’t gonna hear about it either way.
“Oh my god!” Sophia squeals. “Look!”
I follow the line of her finger toward a few blinking bulbs of light floating around overhead. “What, you’ve never seen lightning bugs before?” I chuckle.
“Not like that!” Her hand comes back to cup my face, and I set my beer down before wrapping my arms around her. “It’s beautiful out here. I’m really glad you brought me.”
“Me too,” I tell her, moving my hand to the tack of her jeans.
I slip the tack through the button hole and slide my hand into her panties, earning a satisfied sigh from her as I rest my hand on her pussy. My fingers trace lazy circles over her clit, bringing my other hand up to wrap around her throat, forcing her head back until it rests against my shoulder.
“I need you to do somethin’ for me, Sugar,” I tell her.
“Hmmm?”
Pressing my mouth to the shell of her ear, I growl, “Run.”
She gets up so damn fast I can feel the zipper of her jeans scrape against the back of my hand, and she hops down off of the tailgate before hauling ass into a line of trees, glancing over her shoulder at me with that wicked grin I fucking love.
Climbing out of the truck bed, I lean against the tailgate and shout into the trees while I count. “Ten! Nine! Eight! Seven! Six!” I palm my swelling cock, already aching, while I force myself to stay in place. “Five! Four! Three! Two! Fucking one!”