Eighteen
DINNER IS WELL worth waiting for, the way it just about always is with my grandmother, no matter what time it’s served, and no matter what’s on the menu.
Baked ham tonight, with a green bean casserole that is one of her many specialties, fresh rolls with the butter already melted into them when I sit down, baked macaroni and cheese as another side dish.
I rip through all of it, getting right to seconds in almost record time, even for me.
I look over at her occasionally and can’t decide, as I watch her watch me eat, which one of us is happier at the moment.
When I finish round two, my plate totally clean, she smiles.
“There’s still more of everything,” she says. “Not my first rodeo.”
I sit back and sigh contentedly.
“I’m gonna just pretend that it’s halftime.”
“Don’t know about the rest of you, hon,” EJ says. “But your appetite still seems to be in fine working order.”
I reach for the pitcher of iced tea, homemade of course, just a splash of lemonade in it, and pour myself another glass.
“Lot’s changed in my world,” I say. “But it pleases me to no end that yours hasn’t.”
“Better now that I’ve got you back,” she says. “Though it does hurt my heart some because of the way I got you back.”
I smile at her. “Well,” I say, “not nearly as much as it hurts me.”
She never eats much and never has, and doesn’t tonight, despite the feast she prepared. I watch her push her food around a little more, almost like a kid.
“And just so you know,” she says. “My world here in Cross Rivers is changing, and not for the good.”
“You’re talking about the missing girls?” I ask. “Now one more gone without a trace.”
“And another one right here from this town,” she says. “You know Leamon Ridenour’s girl got taken about a month ago. Happened while you were in the rehab.”
Leamon Ridenour has his own small soybean farm on the other side of town. He hadn’t been a close friend of my father’s, but everybody in Cross Rivers knows everybody else at least a little bit.
“I read about it,” I say. “Awful.”
“A kind of awful you can’t even wrap your head around,” she says. “But it’s even more than that, Silas. Like a bad moon rising lately. I don’t know whether you know it or not, but the county hospital over in Carson had to close its doors just the other week.”
“I didn’t know,” I say. “What happened, they run out of money? I know that’s been happening with hospitals the last few years.”
EJ shakes her head. “They finally just couldn’t handle the traffic because of the drugs.
Both from the ones who survived the overdoses and the ones who didn’t.
Here in town, there were two more deaths at the high school in second semester alone.
” Now she gives a fiercer shake. “I tell myself it never would have happened if your father were still alive. He would have stopped those drug dealers even if the law couldn’t. Probably with his bare hands.”
We sit there in silence until she snaps, “Dammit all to hell and back, I hate those Crocketts.”
“You think they’re the ones pushing the drugs?”
“I do,” she says, “not that anybody’s ever been able to prove it or hold them to account.”
“The police must be trying,” I say.
“I’m sure they are,” EJ says, “but it’s like they say about gambling casinos. The house always wins. And around here the Crocketts aren’t just the house, it’s like they’re the law, and one unto themselves.”
Tonight she lets me help her clean up. When we’re done with all that, she tells me to sit myself back down, then produces a cherry pie she’s baked for me and had been hiding in the next room. She plates it with vanilla ice cream.
Before I head upstairs, thinking I’m going to have to spend twice as much time in the gym tomorrow to work off all this food, she tells me that she forgot to mention it before, but Taylor had called her phone while I was in the gym when she hadn’t been able to raise me on mine.
“By now that girl knows that returning missed calls has never been one of your strong suits.”
“I just assume if it’s important enough,” I say, “they’ll always call back.”
“You got her number?”
“I do.”
“Gonna call her back?”
“Not tonight,” I say. “Being a farmer now has already worn my ass out.”
“You’re about as much cut out for farming as your father was,” she says.
I give her a hug, holding her close for what feels like a long time.
“I’m too tired for any more talking today,” I say. “At least not if it’s about me.”
“You were never any good at that,” she says.
There is a sweet, serene quality to her, a calm, that has always made me feel safe. She was like that even in those first days at the hospital. It’s why her brief outburst at the table the night before had been so out of character for her.
My father had always told me I got my own calm from her.
“Now go get some sleep,” she says, and then adds, “Farmer man.”
Tonight, I do fall asleep right away, Bumper in her bed on the floor next to me, both of us sound asleep until the familiar nightmare wakes me again.