Chapter 11
I’ve moved the petunias off the little table on the back porch and set it with coral-colored place mats I found in a hutch and two of Mabel’s flowered plates, along with condiments, burger toppings, and a small salad with tongs from Mabel’s drawer.
When Matt squeezes the platter of grilled food in between it all and takes a seat across from me, the table feels even tinier and I find myself turning to the side to make sure our knees don’t bump underneath.
“This is ... cozy,” he says, also clearly aware of the table’s smallness. I can’t really see his eyes for the worn cowboy hat, but something in his tone makes me think that even he finds it a little too close for comfort, and for the first time with him, I feel less alone in my awkwardness.
As I assemble my burger, I’m seeking a source of conversation, and my eyes fall to an electronic device on his belt. “What’s that for?” I point with my fork.
“Pager,” he says. “In case of a police emergency.”
“Wow,” I reply, shocked anew by the lack of up-to-date technology here.
“I know, I know—Dark Ages. But it works well in mountainous areas. And fortunately, it doesn’t go off much.”
“Not a lot of high crime in Lost and Found?”
He peeks up at me from beneath the brim of his hat as I start shucking my corn—which I must admit looks and smells delicious. “Nope, it’s a pretty low-pressure job. Won’t make out like it’s not.”
“So what kind of hoops does one have to jump through to rise to that position in a bustling metropolis like Lost and Found?” I ask as I butter my corn.
He tilts his head to say, “The biggest hoop of all around here—agreein’ to take the job. In my case, that hoop was kinda on fire, so guess I jumped through to put out the flames.”
“On fire how?” I’m surprisingly intrigued.
He casts a small smile across the table as he piles some salad onto his plate and reaches for the dressing. “Well, you might’ve noticed that our little town isn’t exactly ... thrivin’.”
“Um, you can say that again.”
“The more stuff that shuts down, the more folks move away. Can’t blame ’em—gotta have jobs, gotta have food.
But the more things that close up, the closer we get to losin’ other things, too.
When Big Willie Kane retired as police chief about eight years ago, they couldn’t get anybody to take the job.
And if you can’t support a police force, it gets absorbed by the nearest town that can.
For some little towns, it’s one of the final death knells.
You lose your police, then you lose your post office, then you lose your town government altogether, then your town completely disappears and gets swallowed up by the mountains.
“And I don’t know—maybe to an outsider it doesn’t seem like there’s much worth savin’, but I grew up here, right in that house.” He uses his butter knife to point at the white farmhouse where he still resides. “So guess it’s different for me—felt worth holdin’ on to. I came home and took the job.”
At this, my eyebrows shoot up. “Came home from where? You haven’t always lived here?”
He chuckles as he answers, “Hell no, I haven’t always lived here.
I was rarin’ to leave when I was growin’ up.
Got my degree in police studies with a minor in criminal justice at Eastern, then got a job on the force in Lexington.
And truth is—I’d have gladly moved farther away, but the opportunity there came and I took it. ”
I’m agog as I bite into my corn on the cob. He’s college educated.
But the corn totally steals his attention when I least expect it, spurring him to say, “Now you tell me that’s not the best, sweetest corn you ever sank your teeth into.”
My mind is on other things besides corn, yet ... “Okay, I can’t. It’s delicious.”
He nods with as much pride as if he grew it himself.
“And then what happened?” I ask, wanting to get back to the subject of ... him. “In Lexington.”
“Well, about five years into the job, I met a girl, got married, had a baby, all that stuff.” He’s chomping away on his burger now and tossing this out between bites like it’s just your common everyday run-of-the-mill information.
“Oh,” I say, taken aback. In ever so many ways. Is it really possible he has a wife? Where does she fit into this picture with Joy Lynn? And there’s a child, too? My head might explode.
“And we were happy,” he says. “Things were great.”
Okay, “were.” Past tense. But this still sounds like a much more complex life than I anticipated Matthew Cordray having. “Until ...?” I venture cautiously.
“Until my mom got sick. My dad had already passed away, not long after we had Samantha—she’s fourteen now.
He died of black lung from workin’ in the coal mines.
Hell, that alone was reason enough to get outta here—uncles, cousins, both my grandpas, all ended up in the mines and most didn’t live to be very old, much as big coal still doesn’t wanna talk about that.
But as I say, my mom got sick—she was diagnosed with a brain tumor about five years after Dad passed.
So I took a leave of absence from work and came home to care for her while she was dying. ”
I’m suddenly finding it hard to breathe normally.
The part about his dad is awful—I’ve always heard of black lung, but didn’t know it was a thing that still existed—yet the part about his mom is even worse.
And he’s just ... saying it, telling me this like he really knows me, like we’re more than just casual acquaintances, like it’s easy to talk about.
When I can’t even tell Kevin and Sydney how much they mean to me.
“I’m so sorry,” I manage to get out.
He looks up from his food and says, “Whoops—didn’t mean to ruin the meal. It sucked, but it was a long time ago, and it’s how life goes sometimes.”
“Still, I know that kind of thing is hard.” Understatement of the century.
“Yep. But no need to dwell on it. It’s just how I came to be at home when Willie announced he was hangin’ up his holster and they couldn’t find anybody to take his place.
What timing, huh? Hadn’t been back much other than holidays in fifteen years until then, and suddenly Lost and Found needs a police chief or the whole place is gonna crumble. ”
“So you stayed. Gave up your life in Lexington? That easy?”
He looks up from under that dirty brim. “Easy? Nope. Hardest damn thing I’ve gone through, even harder than Mom dyin’ the way she did.”
“What happened?” I almost don’t want to know because this has all gotten so heavy and I’m wondering what else is as hard as nursing a parent to their death. But I’m still waiting to hear about the wife.
“I thought it over long and hard, about the job,” he says.
“Didn’t make the decision lightly. I have other family here, too—people who, frankly, need some lookin’ after sometimes.
And I didn’t exactly want that to be my responsibility, but once Mom and Dad were gone, I felt like .
.. it was what they’d want me to do. So I talked to Kristin, my wife, and told her I wanted to accept the job offer, move our family here, and build a quieter life in the country.
She agreed, and I took the job. And shortly after that is when I found out . ..”
“What?” I admit I’m on the edge of my seat here, barely able to eat.
“That she had a boyfriend.”
My jaw drops. I nearly drop my burger along with it but manage to keep it in my grip.
“Apparently the three months it took my mother to die was three months too long to leave my wife alone.”
“Wow.” Is that the wrong response? I’m not sure, so I move on with, “I’m so sorry, Matt.”
“I won’t lie—it sucked the life outta me. I mean, if she’d said she didn’t want me to take the job, I wouldn’t have. But since she didn’t ... well, Lost and Found seemed like a good enough place to lick my wounds, so I kept the job, just not my marriage.”
“What about your daughter?” I ask.
And this is the first time I’ve ever seen Matthew Cordray look truly sad.
“That was the roughest part. We share custody, with the plan that Sam would come down on weekends and for the summer. For all her faults, Kristin’s never been unreasonable or tried to keep me from bein’ part of Samantha’s life.
She got remarried, and her husband, Vince, is a good stepdad.
So it’s been as amiable as such a situation can be. But it’s just not the same, ya know?”
I nod, as if I know, even though I don’t. But I can imagine.
“You have a kid and you think—assume—you’re gonna be in that kid’s life every day, and them in yours, until they grow up, that you’re gonna get to do all the normal dad stuff and have a normal dad life. And then—kaboom—that’s gone.”
“But she comes on the weekends and in summer?” I ask. I tilt my head, the whole sun hat tilting with it. “Because I haven’t, um, seen ...”
“Yeah, that’s the other sucky part,” he tells me.
“She’s gettin’ older. So when there’s stuff at home— her home in Lexington—that she wants to do on weekends, am I gonna keep her from it?
No. She’s always sweet as hell about it, sayin’, ‘I was invited to a swim party this weekend, but I’d rather come see you.
’ And I know that’s not true, because it’s hard for a dad to compete with an in-ground pool and a party with boys, so I tell her she should skip this weekend and go.
And it’s fine. But the older she gets, the more weekends we skip.
“And then in May she was offered a trip to Florida all summer with her best friend, stayin’ at the friend’s grandma’s, and was I gonna say no? I mean, hell, it’s a teenager’s dream— I’d like to go stay on the beach all summer, too.” He’s grinning softly now.
But I still say, “You miss her, though.”