Eighty-Eight
EJ HAS GONE ahead and invited Abby to join her and Taylor and Vince and me. She describes it as being one of her executive decisions.
On the porch, Taylor and I are drinking beer. EJ has built herself an industrial-sized old-fashioned.
“I know that Abby wants what’s best for you, too,” Tay says to me. “I figure that’s as good a basis for a friendship as any.”
“Better late than never,” I say.
“Listen, I’ve always liked the girl, I have,” she says. Then she grins and adds, “Just never loved her.”
After Abby arrives and we’re all seated in the dining room, EJ announces that we’re going to talk about everything except football tonight, house rules, violators forfeit dessert.
“Which, I might point out,” she adds, “is the opposite of all the times I sat at this table with Silas and his buddies and the only thing we talked about was football.”
“Well, that,” I say, “and how truly fine your cooking is.”
“Duh,” Tay says.
Fried chicken is on the menu tonight. A mountain of fried chicken. Biscuits and more of EJ’s white gravy on the side. Collard greens. Hush puppies, fried to perfection. Southern dining at its very finest.
By the time we’re halfway through dinner, it’s become clear that I don’t have to worry about anybody bringing up what had happened in Pittsburgh because all Taylor wants to talk about is the Crocketts.
“Helene is becoming convinced of local knowledge: that when we’re talking about the Southern Mafia, and I mean all over this part of the state, Briar Crockett is the head of the snake,” she says.
“As insulting as that is to copperheads and water moccasins,” EJ says.
“Him and his sons,” Vince says. “Like a whole family of snakes crawling around.”
I look over and notice Tay is the only one not eating, too focused—or maybe too consumed—by the topic at hand and her clear hatred of everything Crockett related.
“Burt didn’t like to go too deep into the weeds with me on his investigations,” she says.
“He’d let me in a little bit, not all the way, just because he continued to think until the end that the less I knew about his business, the safer I was.
Just in case I got caught behind enemy lines, he used to joke with me. ”
Abby says, “Taylor, do you believe that the Crocketts had something to do with Burt’s death?”
Taylor looks across the table at her, a familiar fierceness to her eyes, the set of her jaw. The set of her as she arches up her back.
“I believe it,” she says, “and Helene Mayes is convinced of it.”
Tay turns to me. “I met with Helene again while you and Vince were up there in Pittsburgh,” she says.
“She’s focusing on Burt being in an unmarked car the day he got shot.
Because he’d been focusing on the drug trade that last week, and she believes something must have been about to break.
” She nods emphatically. “Helene believes he had some kind of lead, and she told me that she herself now has got a lead on what it was. And who she thinks Burt might have been on his way to see the day he died.”
“She tell you who?” I ask.
A small smile plays across her lips. “She told me the less I know for now, the better,” Tay says. “And in that moment she sounded just like my husband.”
I say, “I could probably get her to tell me. She’s practically deputized me now, same as Burt did.”
“No,” Tay snaps, the sharpness of her tone surprising us all.
“Whoa,” I say. “You’re the one who told me you hope I can find who did it even before the cops do.”
“I know what I said, Silas,” she says. “But we need to let Helene handle this for now, in her own way. Not just because it’s safer for me. Because it’s safer for everybody.”
She slowly looks around the table.
“Helene Mayes didn’t come out and say it to me,” she says. “But I get the sense that this whole damn thing is about to break wide open, and not in a good way for the Crockett family.”
We all let that settle for a bit. Everyone has finished with the main course by now, which means it’s time for Taylor’s Crazy Chocolate Cake, one she managed to bake this afternoon in EJ’s kitchen without running into one of EJ’s sharp elbows while my grandmother was doing her own cooking in there.
I know from experience, from the times I’ve tried to help, that cooking with EmmaJean Tucker can turn into a contact sport in the blink of an eye.
“Those fuckers are going down,” Taylor says now. Ducks her head and says, “Sorry for the language there, EJ.”
“Don’t be sorry with me,” my grandmother says. “Fuck them, and the pickups they rode in on.”
She claps her hands together, smiling everywhere except with her eyes.
“Now, who wants cake?”