Twenty-Nine
It had been just the one shotgun blast behind Rowdy’s, so maybe nobody had called it in, thinking it might possibly be somebody’s engine backfiring. Or, it being Rowdy’s, that it might not have been the first time a gun had gone off back there, even lately.
What I do is drive straight home and go to bed, after what feels like the longest day I’ve had since I was first in the hospital after the accident. No waiting for sleep tonight. No nightmares.
I’m having coffee at the kitchen table when EJ, in her jogging suit and pink sneakers, takes her morning walk, what she still calls her “constitutional,” and sees what the front of the truck looks like.
“Were you taking artillery fire last night?” she asks when she’s back inside.
My little grandmother loves her shoot-’em-up war movies. I’ve long since stopped trying to understand it.
“Caught a rock on the way home,” I say casually. “No big deal.”
“Must have been a pretty big rock,” she says. She raises an eyebrow.
“You know what can happen when one catches the windshield just so.”
“Is that so?” she says skeptically.
“Well,” I say, “that’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.”
After my coffee, I drive over to Bobby Moore’s Safeline Auto Glass, on SR 31 between Scobee’s and town. Bobby is another old boy who’d played high school ball with my father. Now he and his son, Rick, run Safeline.
Bobby is wearing the same overalls he’s worn every time I’ve ever shown up at his shop, the last time being when EJ’s Suburban really had caught a rock that had spidered her windshield right before I’d decided to come home for my last spring break at UNC.
Bobby is a champion spitter of tobacco, too.
Even my father had been from time to time, at least in the privacy of his own home, and when EJ wasn’t around to see.
A fondness for any kind of tobacco, though, has obviously skipped a generation with me.
I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life.
Or gone within a country mile of weed, even in college, always imagining what the headlines would be like if I ever got caught doing it, even in a world as forgiving as it now is over pot.
“You care to talk about what all did that?” Bobby asks, nodding at the truck.
“Rock,” I say. Still sticking to my story, to the end.
“Bull and shit,” he says, and spits. “I’m just wondering whether it was a BB or bird shot.”
“What is this, a grand jury?”
He leans over the hood to take a closer look. “Bird shot, I’m thinking,” he says. He looks at me. “You report this?”
“Report what?” I ask. “A rock hitting my windshield?”
He snorts. “You in trouble with the wrong people?”
“Nothing I can’t handle.”
He gives me a long look and then says, “Come back this afternoon. Pretty sure I got what you need in stock.”
Then he says, “You need a ride somewheres? Rick could take you.”
“I’m just gonna walk back up the road to Scobee’s,” I tell him, “and have a buddy pick me up there. But before he does, I’ve got my heart set on a skillet breakfast sandwich—double over-easy egg and cheddar biscuit.”
He nods and spits again. “Your daddy’s order of choice.”
I smile as I walk away, giving Bobby a wave over my shoulder and thinking that everybody still knows everybody’s business in Cross Rivers.
And how somebody is all the way up in mine now.
Up and over my grill in more ways than one.