One.
Two.
Three.
The slingshot snaps in my hand, startling me. The Black Cat hits the inside of the door and bounces down, glowing on the floorboard between my legs. It makes a sizzling sound that resonates all the way down to my stomach. “Oh no!” I scream, throwing myself across the truck cabin into Arden’s ready-but-surprised arms.
Crack!
I squeeze my eyes shut, expecting pain on my legs or my ankle, a burning sensation bleeding through my jeans. But it doesn’t come. Slowly, I open my eyes and they bring into focus Arden’s amused face—about an inch away from mine.
“So, next time,” he drawls, “you’ll want to aim outside of the truck.”
It’s the first time I’ve ever noticed how Arden smells, and I don’t know why I’m disappointed to find that he smells excessively good. Excessively male. Mortified with my new line of thought, I disentangle myself from him and reclaim my seat, trying to keep my feet lifted up in case the Black Cat has any spark left. The smell of smoke wafts up at me from the floor board, tickling my nose.
And that’s when I laugh. So hard that my stomach aches and my breath comes in wheezy gulps. Soon Arden is bent over the steering wheel gasping for breath himself. Even when it isn’t funny anymore, it’s still funny.
I pick up the slingshot again. “Let’s go to town. But not to the skate park. Only Mayor Douche’s house.”
Arden puts the truck into drive.
Fourteen
Arden pulls into his uncle’s driveway, knowing he won’t be awake at the ungodly hour of seven o’clock in the morning. He probably won’t even remember that Arden promised to come over today to help out with the hedges and the driveway. Arden doubts Cletus will wake up before it’s time to pick up Carly from her first day of work.
He takes a big swig of the to-go coffee Miss May made him when he dropped off Carly just an hour before. Miss May had put him on the spot, asking if he liked it black, and he’d felt obligated to say yes, because black sounds more manly than the concoction of cream and sugar he prefers, and she’d asked in front of Carly.
And for some reason he still can’t explain, he’d felt the need to appear manly at that moment in his life.
His cell phone rings then, and he’s satisfied that the ring tone is sufficiently masculine. “Hey, Mom, what’s up?”
There’s a pause on the other end, and Arden wonders if it’s a faulty signal or if his mom’s meds are slowing down her response time. “Arden, sweetie, are you going into town today?”
“I can. If you need something.”
Another lapse. She sniffs. “Do you mind running to the drugstore and picking up my prescriptions?” She must be having a bad day. She’s probably calling him from Amber’s room. She always goes in there when she runs out of pills; it’s like she starts thawing into a live human being again, capable of emotion and memory and even genuine affection. But mostly just grief.
“Sure, Mom. You need anything else? You can ride with me to town, if you want. Get in a little sunshine?” He doesn’t offer this option often enough, he knows. She needs to get out of the house. Out of her pajamas and into some real clothes.
“Well, that sounds nice, honey, but today is laundry day.”
Laundry day. Arden does his own laundry, and his dad’s uniforms are washed, starched, and pressed for him by the county. She might have a load of towels to tend to, at most. “You sure? We could have lunch at Doris’s. I’ll buy you a slice of pie.” He regrets it as soon as he says it. Amber used to love the coconut cream pie at Doris’s. He knows that’s what’s going through his mother’s head right now.
He listens for her reaction, but is met with several long seconds of vacant silence. Then he hears her sniffle. “No thanks, honey. I think I’ll stay in today.” She hangs up.
Dammit.
He considers ditching Cletus and going to get the meds now, so she can slip back into her emotionless chasm. It’s the right thing to do, he tells himself. But his hands won’t start the truck. Because Amber deserves to be grieved by her mother, even if it is in bits and pieces here and there, small moments of memories that can’t be stolen away by some powerful drug. And his mother deserves the healing power of grief.
He gets out of the truck, leaving his cell phone on the seat.
Arden lets himself in the back door to his uncle’s house, careful not to make too much noise while still doubting that any amount of clamor would wake a slumbering, hungover Cletus. Even from the Florida room in the back, he can hear his uncle’s snores resonate from the ballroom.
Arden finds the keys to the massive shed in the backyard and sets out to find a pair of trimmers. Of course, he finds them in the very back of the huge wood building, and has to dig them out of a pile of yard tools probably not used since the 1980s. The dust he stirs up reminds him of the smoke in his truck cabin last night after Carly took aim at the passenger door with the slingshot.
The corners of his mouth draw up in an involuntary smile. He remembers the sheer delight on her face when her first attempt at Mayor Busch’s house resulted in a dead-on shot of what Arden knows to be his bedroom window. The crack of the explosion was so loud that Carly let out a little surprised scream and Arden had to pull over to keep from wrecking them, he was laughing so hard.
“Crazy girl,” Arden says under his breath. He throws the trimmers over his shoulder and makes his way toward the front driveway. He’ll never get all of them done before he has to go back and get Carly, but he figures he can come here on the weekend while she’s at work and … He stops in his tracks.
Am I working around a girl’s schedule?
No, he decides adamantly. He’s working around a friend’s schedule. That’s completely different. Carly is a girl, sure, but she’s not that kind of girl. She’s not, like, date-able or anything. (Of course, he felt the exact opposite when he found her in his lap last night and her lips were this close to touching his.) No no no. She’s his accomplice. And he can tell he’s already got her hooked on raising Cain.
Hours come and go and Arden’s shirt is soaked through with sweat and dirt and whatever kind of powdery fungus is growing on the azalea bushes in the driveway. He was able to get the right side done; next weekend he’ll come back and do the left. Right now though, he has to run home and get a shower before he picks up Carly.
He scowls. What do I care if she sees me all gross and grimy? He wouldn’t care if Luke saw him like this. Hell, I’d probably pull him into a headlock so he could get the full sense of my noxious pits.
“I figured out it was you,” a voice comes from behind him as he’s lowering the trimmers.
Arden turns to face Cletus. The old man is wearing house slippers, faded jeans, and a wrinkled T-shirt; all look clean. His white hair is wet and combed back, as if he’d just showered. Arden tries to calculate the odds of that scenario. “Well, it’s not like I was hiding out here. What are you doing awake, anyway?”
Cletus scowls. “I’m talking about the store, boy. It was you. Wasn’t it?”
Arden wastes no time on regret. His uncle might be humiliated, but at least he’s not in the morgue—and at least no one else is as a result of that night, either. “It was me.”
Cletus nods, tucking his thumbs into his jeans pocket. “That rifle was your dad’s from three Christmases ago. He never uses it.”
This is true. Arden thought it a pretty good idea to use his dad’s own rifle in case any shots were fired—not that there were going to be shots fired, it wouldn’t have come to that—then the casings would match a gun registered to the one and only Sheriff Moss. “It was his.”
This confirms what Cletus already knows. He seems relieved to have gotten a confession so easily. “I got up today to come pay you a visit. To have a little chat about … about what happened.”
Arden understands perfectly. His uncle is embarrassed. Wants to keep it between them. He shrugs. “Nothing happened.”
Cletus nods again, rocking back o
n his slippered heels. He clears his throat. “Well. Now that we got that all settled … You want some breakfast? I can cook up some eggs and bacon real fast.”
Arden positions the trimmers between his legs to keep them steady, then peels off his drenched T-shirt. Wringing it out in the sand beside him, he says, “I would, but I’ve got to pick up Carly from work.”
Cletus’s eyes light up. “Carly from the Breeze Mart?” Then his eyes narrow to near slits. “Why are you picking her up from work? Boy, you’d better return that bicycle to her—”
“I already did. She needs a ride because it’s too far to ride her bike.”
“What do you mean?”
Arden wipes the sweat and dirt from his arms. “I mean I got her a job at Uppity Rooster as a waitress. She’s working the morning shift today. I’ve got to go shower before I pick her up.”
Cletus is all mean mugging and evil eye. “What business is it of yours where that girl works? Now, boy, you’d better not be trying to—”
“We’re friends,” Arden says quickly. When Cletus gets too excited, his hands start to shake. Right now they shudder like a washing machine on spin cycle. It’s the beginnings of a massive tantrum, Arden can tell. “I’m just trying to make up for scaring her to death is all.”
“Like you’re doing to me?”
“I’m just trying to help you out.”
“Did I ask for your help, boy?”
Arden gives a hard laugh. “You didn’t have to. Anyone with eyeballs can see how badly you needed these trimmed. I brought the dragger from the baseball field too, to flatten out the driveway. I’ll drive up and down it a couple times.”
Cletus thinks on this, pushing out his stubborn bottom lip, his gaze resting over Arden’s shoulder, on the dirt road stretched before him. “I suppose that’d be okay.” Then he snaps back to attention and pushes his index finger into Arden’s chest. His breath smells like mint instead of the deep end of a whiskey bottle. This whole coming-to-Jesus meeting with Arden he’d intended this morning must have been important to him. “But let’s get something straight right here right now, boy. You’re to stay away from Carly Vega. She ain’t got nothing you’re interested in.”
“And how would you know what interests me?” Sure, she’s not his “type” or whatever. He usually goes for blondes with legs that stretch across centuries. Not petite Latina chicks whose hobby seems to be putting him in his place.
Arden is disgusted with himself for categorizing Carly as a type at all. She’s not a type, she’s my wingman. However cheesy that may sound.
“I talk to your mama, son,” Cletus drawls. “She tells me what you do—and what you don’t do. Carly’s a good girl. Hard worker. She’s not interested in wasting her time with clowns and their shenanigans.”
Arden wants to correct him. To tell him that until midnight last night, she acted a clown herself, shooting firecrackers out of the passenger seat of his truck. At the mayor’s house, no less. Of course, her aim left something to be desired, so usually stop signs and bushes and sidewalks were her main victims, but the point is, she loved every second of it.
In fact, Arden would venture to say that Carly Vega—underneath all that do-gooder exterior and overachiever shell—is a closet fan of nonsense.
But Arden doesn’t say anything. It’s not his place to correct Cletus, and what’s more, it’s not worth arguing with the old man. He’d just accuse Arden of tainting Carly or something else along those frayed, eccentric lines.
“You sure didn’t mind this clown coming to help you with your hedges today,” Arden says, picking up pace with his uncle on their way back to the house.
“And I wouldn’t mind if you brought your whole circus of friends back to help, either. This place could use some attention, you know.”
Arden scowls. This place could use more than attention. It could use an overhaul. But instead of trying to persuade his friends to come over and work, Arden has a better idea. “How about I come by on the weekends and pick up some projects around here? Your fence in the back wouldn’t stop a toddler from getting in and your barn needs to be organized something fierce. And when’s the last time you had the house cleaned? It’s starting to smell like you, old man.”
Cletus wrinkles his nose. “You ain’t too old to take a belt to, boy.”
Arden grins. “I’ll be back Saturday morning to finish those hedges. Then I’ll start on the fence in the backyard.” It all works out perfectly. He’ll drop Carly off at work on Saturdays and Sundays and then come help Cletus with things around the house. That will keep his mind off his new accomplice.
Wait, what?
“I don’t need your charity,” Cletus is saying unconvincingly.
“No, but your fence does.”
Cletus hesitates a moment, scrutinizing Arden. Then he spits on the ground. “She’s already rubbing off on you, boy. Since when were you ever interested in hard work?”
“Since it’s become obvious you’re actually going to let my aunt Dorothy’s house fall into shambles.”
This shuts up the old man, as it should. It’s not just his house; it never has been. This estate was the pride and joy of Aunt Dorothy. There was never a minute of the day that she wasn’t doing something to improve it or beautify it, and never a weekend went by without guests at her dinner table. Cletus knows it. Arden knows it.
“Fine. You come by on the weekends. But I don’t want your charity. I’ll pay you for your work.”
“I didn’t ask to get paid.” As it is, Arden’s ashamed of himself for letting it get this bad in the first place. He can only imagine the look of disappointment he’d get from his aunt. She’d always thought the world of him. She’d never say anything, she just wasn’t like that, but he’d see it in her eyes that he’d let her down. She was really good at the pretty-Southern-belle-disenchantment pout.
Plus Arden knows his uncle isn’t capable of keeping up with these sorts of things anymore. He’d never say it out loud, because stubborn makes up part of his bloodstream—the part that isn’t alcohol.
“You didn’t ask, so that’s why I’m paying you. And anyway, it would tickle your pa’s temper to see you making money instead of asking him for it all the time. You wouldn’t have to go to him for anything. Especially if I’m the one paying you. That’s worth it all by itself.” This is true. The great Sheriff Moss has always been opposed to Arden picking up a job. He’d always assumed it was because his father wanted him to play sports, make good grades, get into FSU. But Cletus just made him realize it’s more than just that. It’s exactly what Arden has been trying so hard not to relinquish to anyone.
His freedom.
If I had a job, I wouldn’t have to go to him for anything.
Arden hasn’t played sports or made good grades since Amber died. He hasn’t resembled a good son since then. Yet, his father still leaves money on the kitchen counter for him every Sunday night. Before, he was glad to relieve his old man of some cash and blow it on whatever he wants. He thought that was hurting his father somehow, to waste his money on frivolous things. Now he realizes what it really is. Taking his dad’s money doesn’t hurt his dad, it hurts himself. It’s a way of controlling me. Of making sure I’m dependent on him. So he can say he did all he could for me. Just like he did with Amber.
Materially, Amber had it all. A new car that she never got to drive, new clothes, new laptop whenever she asked. But Amber never had her father. Not after he found out she was schizophrenic. Not after he realized she didn’t fit in with the “normal family” image he was trying to maintain because God forbid the county sheriff should have mental illness running in his blood, sleeping in his own house. Election years were the worst. He kept Amber on a short leash, sometimes locking her in her room for days at a time. Never letting her go out in public, lest potential voters get a chance to see her talking to herself. From the minute their father found out she was ill, she was homeschooled. Cut off from her friends. Cut off from the world except through televisio
n and the Internet and whatever news Arden could tell her from school. He even stopped letting her come to Arden’s football games—something she loved dearly.
Amber was alive but not living.
Arden’s mother didn’t like it, thought it was a bit extreme, but she never disagreed. Never stood up for her daughter. Nope. What Dwayne Moss said was law. Period.
After Amber died, his mother was torn to pieces. At first, Arden was glad. He thought his mom deserved the torment. To be a rag doll with few signs of life except for lung capacity and a beating heart. But then he realized she was a victim too. She wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t sleep, would hardly talk. She needed help, Arden knew, just like Amber did, but Dwayne Moss was too prideful to let his wife actually see a therapist. So she got pills from the family doctor—a good ol’ boy who would refill the prescriptions without requiring something so inconvenient as regular visits. With Sheriff Moss, it’s all about appearances. Which is why his father went on with his life without much outward remorse, or really any kind of reaction, about his daughter’s death. In fact, he actually blamed Amber for what she did in the end.
That’s what happens when you’re not content with your lot in life, he’d said. We did all we could for her.
Arden had wanted to kill him.
“You’re right,” Arden says, unballing fists he didn’t realize he’d clenched. “It would make him mad if I got a job.”
Cletus scratches his belly, nodding. “It would gall the hell outta him, I’d say. Getting paid cash under the table, not paying your taxes on it. How could he explain that to his precious voters?”
Arden laughs. “He’d say I was working for free. That you didn’t pay anything. That he always paid for everything I needed.”
“Guess I’d better write you a check then.” The mischievous glint in his uncle’s eyes says it’s a done deal. Arden would work here on the weekends while Carly worked at the café. Uncle Cletus would pay him under the table. Arden would no longer accept money from his dad. He and Carly could turn the county upside down with their reverie.