She’d forgotten what a good dancer Skelly was. He was surprisingly light on his feet, and she was just buzzed enough to forget her usual inhibitions, lean in, and let him lead. He skimmed her gracefully across the dance floor, humming softly in her ear. “From this moment…”
“No, no, no,” she mumbled.
“Remember the last time we danced to this song?” he asked.
“You mean that time your mom made you take me to the country club dance because your real girlfriend was such a skank?”
“Steffi? She wasn’t a skank,” he protested.
“Oh, please. She put out like a gas station Coke box.”
“Wonder whatever happened to her?” He looked down at Conley. “My mom didn’t make me take you, you know.”
“You took me straight home after the dance, when everybody else was going out to Cady Alexander’s beach house for the after-party. The next day, I heard you hooked up with Steffi there.”
He winced. “High school guys are pigs. I didn’t know you knew.”
“I knew,” Conley said. “Steffi made sure.”
“But you were dating that dude from the fancy Virginia prep school, so what difference did it make anyway?” Skelly asked. “We were just friends, right? Besides, your big sister would have called the cops on me if I’d tried anything funny with you.”
She waved away his protests. “Water under the bridge.” She yawned widely and just then spotted the neon clock mounted over the bar. “Oh, man. It’s nearly three!”
“So?”
She stopped dancing and shook her head. “I promised G’mama we’d leave for the beach at nine! It’ll take me forever to load up all the crap she and Winnie are taking.”
He grabbed for her arm and missed. “Hey, slow down.”
“Can’t. I gotta go.” She dug in her pocket for her car keys, and Skelly snatched them away.
“No way,” he said firmly. “You’re wasted. Those were double shots Trish was pouring you tonight.”
She grabbed for his arm but missed, stumbled, and nearly tripped over her own feet.
“Whoa. Yeah. Maybe you’re right.”
She gave him a weak smile. “Gimme a ride home?”
He tucked his arm through hers. “I think I can remember the way.”
8
The man in black leaned into the mic and let out a long, exaggerated yawn that had become his signature. “Okay, night stalkers. It’s the witching hour, so I’m passing the baton to my friend Mara. This is WSVR, the voice of Silver Bay, and you’ve been listening to Up All Night with Buddy Bright.” He flipped a switch and cued his sign-off music, Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour.”
Mara, who’d been standing just inside the carpeted walls of the broadcast booth, nodded, then slid into the still-warm chair he’d just vacated, adjusting her dark hair before donning the headset.
He gathered his stuff—his keys, smokes, and lighter—and walked outside. It had cooled some, and for that, he was grateful. He lit a cigarette, inhaling deeply to draw the smoke into his lungs. After he’d smoked exactly half the cigarette, he dropped the butt to the sidewalk and crushed it with the heel of his black, lizard-skin boot.
The Corvette was parked around back of the studio. It would have been more convenient to park in the spot out front, the one the station had painted with a sign that said RESERVED FOR THE MAN IN BLACK, but there was too much traffic out front. Too many passersby and careless drivers. He unlocked and then circled the car, flicking bits of leaves and dead bugs from the body, looking for any dings or dents. Nothing. Good. The white 1986 Vette was the only vestige of his old life, the only thing of value that he’d salvaged from the ruins of his past.
His knees cracked as he lowered himself into the driver’s seat. He was getting too old for this shit. He told himself that every night. Every morning. He started the car and let the engine idle, listening appreciatively to the low rumble of the powerful motor.
He pulled into the alley behind the station, then onto the street. He drove slowly around the square. It was deserted. When he passed the courthouse and the sheriff’s office, with the patrol car parked out front, he felt the inevitable ping of anxiety as he always did, but then he brushed it aside as he had earlier with the desiccated bug on the Corvette’s right rear bumper.
All the local cops knew him, joked with him at the ball games, gave him the inside scoop when there was a bad wreck or some actual news around town worth reporting. He’d stop by the sheriff’s office when he worked the afternoon shift, check out the incident reports, see if there was any news. He drank coffee with these guys, shot the shit with them. But he never let up his guard. Never.
Wariness wasn’t just a habit for him, it was a way of life. So he was watchful as he drove, as he passed the old abandoned mill and then the high school. God, he was glad school and, with it, baseball season were over. He hated sweating his balls off in the wooden press box, doing the play-by-play for a miserable hundred bucks a game. Still, that was money he’d miss until football season started up again in the fall. It was gas money, cigarette money, rent money. He’d need to line up some gigs for the summer, a prospect he dreaded. In the meantime, he’d keep working extra shifts at the station. Sleep? Who needed it?
Soon he was on the county road and clear of the Silver Bay city limits. Moonlight painted the pavement silver. He lowered the Vette’s windows and pressed down on the accelerator.
He was doing eighty now, and his carefully moussed and combed hair whipped about his narrow, angular face, but he didn’t care. He was Buddy Bright, Up All Night, a thing of his own creation.
He punched a button on the dashboard, and music poured from the speakers. He’d found a new station out of Tallahassee, run by college kids at the university. It didn’t suck as much as the corporate-owned radio factories that had taken over the airwaves in the past decade. These little smart-asses played good music—some alt-rock, yeah, but their overnight deejay, a guy who called himself Cosmic, played the kind of headbanging heavy metal stuff he himself had played back in the day.
“Here’s a good-time tune for my man Buddy over on the Panhandle,” Cosmic said after a long, depressing set of Nirvana.
He cranked up the volume and thumped the steering wheel as Van Halen’s “Dance the Night Away” blasted out of the speakers.
Before he knew it, he’d driven all the way out the causeway to the beach, slowing when he approached the bridge, because he knew the cops liked to lurk behind the now-darkened surf shop to ambush speeding teenagers.
The Vette cruised down to the end of the narrow island, to the tiny marina, and then he turned around, finally parking in the driveway of a house under construction. He got out, locked the car, and picked his way carefully through the construction debris and down to the edge of the dunes.
He stared out at the huge moon reflected in the calm waters of the Gulf, mesmerized as always, after all those years he’d spent in the Midwest, by the mere existence of such a seemingly endless body of water. For a minute, he thought about walking down onto the beach, but the idea was instantly rejected when he glanced down and remembered these were his favorite boots. Instead, he inhaled a lungful of salt air, releasing it slowly. This, he realized, was the only time he liked being at the beach. At night.
Back in the car, he cruised aimlessly, one arm resting on the windowsill, over the bridge, then out onto the county road, passing vast green farm fields, stands of timber, rows and rows of pine trees planted in military precision. He passed a sign alerting him that he’d crossed into Bronson County. The land was hillier here, the tree line thicker. This was quail country, he knew from countless nights traveling this same territory. He slowed, glimpsing moss-draped oak and pecan trees lining driveways half-hidden behind elaborate wrought iron gates set in brick walls.
The names of the plantations were all familiar now: Whileaway, Pinehaven, Folley, Buie’s Creek. He was startled at the presence of another car, pausing briefly at the gates of the pl
antation up ahead.
Oak Springs Farm, that was the one. As he watched, the gates swung open, and a gleaming black SUV bounced onto the highway, tires squealing as the car accelerated after hitting the pavement.
What the hell? He instantly recognized the car and the driver, an older man he sometimes encountered on his nocturnal ramblings.
The last time had been only a few weeks earlier. He’d walked into the Waffle House near the bypass and slumped onto a stool at the counter. It was past two, and he’d worked a double that day. A moment later, the door opened, and the man paused, then sat next to him. Not really a stranger. It had only taken a moment for Buddy to recognize the man, but he kept his cool.
The waitress knew Buddy, knew the older man too. She poured his coffee, then poised the pot over the empty mug on the counter.
“Y’all want some food?”
“Just coffee for me,” Buddy’d said.
But the stranger asked for grits. No bacon, no eggs, no toast, he’d said. “Just grits.”
Then he turned and gazed at his new companion. “Say that again?”
“What? Just coffee?”
The older man gave it some thought. “I know that voice from somewhere. From the radio, right?”
He’d nodded, stuck out his hand. “Buddy.”
The old guy snapped his fingers. “Up All Night with Buddy Bright.” He shook hands. “I’m, uh, Symmes. I’ve seen you in here a time or two before, right?”
“Now that you say it, yeah, I’ve seen you in here, but I’ve seen you someplace else too.”
“Maybe the WANTED—DEAD OR ALIVE posters at the post office?” The old dude chuckled at his own joke.
The waitress slid a steaming plate of grits with a melting pat of butter in the middle onto the counter. He lifted his fork, tasted, then sprinkled the grits liberally with salt and pepper.
“I got it,” Buddy said, laying it on thick. “You’re the politician. Senator Robinette. Am I right?”
“Representative Robinette,” Symmes said. “But let’s keep that just between us.”
Buddy gave a lame laugh. They were the only customers in the place. “You live around here? Or in Washington?” he asked.
“Both. We have a house in Georgetown and, of course, a place back here in my district.”
“Whereabouts?”
Symmes took a bite of grits, closing his eyes in reverence. “Hmm? Oh, uh, we have a place over at Sugar Key.”
Buddy rubbed his thumb and forefinger together, and Symmes’s face flushed. “We, uh, got a good deal because the developer’s an old friend.”
“Must be nice to have friends that rich,” Buddy commented, and Symmes shifted uncomfortably on the stool.
Buddy sipped his coffee and stared out the window at the SUV, which was a new Escalade. He’d worked drive time at a station in Detroit, back in the ’80s, and he knew his cars. This one was top-of-the-line. American too. He liked that.
“Gotta say, I’m kind of surprised to see a VIP driving himself around this time of night,” he said. “Me, I got insomnia, a product of all those years working the overnight shift. But what about you?”
“Same thing,” Symmes said. “I’m not sleeping well these days.”
“Guilty conscience, huh?” Buddy gave a broad wink to say he was kidding, but Symmes looked stricken.
“Something like that,” he muttered, going back to his grits. He took two more bites, paused, then took another before pushing the plate away.
The waitress pounced. “Something wrong with your grits?”
“No, they were fine. Delicious as always,” Symmes said.
“Okay.” She cleared away his plate.
When the waitress was gone, Symmes said, “I don’t have much of an appetite these days.” He patted his abdomen.
“You sick?” Buddy was just making conversation, killing time, but Symmes seized the moment.
“Off the record?”
“Sure,” Buddy said.
“Actually, I am sick. I don’t like to talk about it because it upsets my wife.”
“Gut problems?” Buddy made sympathetic noises. “Me too, man. Ulcers. The doctors told me I gotta stop drinking coffee, but what the hell?”
“It’s cancer,” Symmes said quietly. He leaned in. “Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.”
“Shit, man. That’s bad, right?”
“So they tell me,” Symmes said. He used his napkin to pat his lips. “It’s not public knowledge, so I’d appreciate it if you’d keep that in strictest confidence.”
Buddy was already regretting his promise. This was news, that Silver Bay’s silver fox congressman was suffering from cancer.
“Can they operate? Give you chemo? Like that?”
Symmes looked around to make sure he couldn’t be overheard, but the waitress was nodding off in a booth by the door, and the grill cook was texting on his phone.
“No surgery. I’ve been doing chemo, but now the doctors say there’s nothing else they can do. And again, this is off the record.”
“Shit,” Buddy repeated. “I’m sorry, man. No wonder you’re not sleeping.”
Symmes stared down at his coffee. “It makes you think about things, you know? Makes you take a hard look at your past.”
When Symmes looked up, his face pale, his eyes bleak, Buddy recognized that it wasn’t just cancer eating away at the old man’s gut and keeping him awake at night. He’d seen the same expression in the mirror for years and years now.
“You’re saying you’ve got regrets?”
The congressman gave him a long, sorrowful look. “You don’t even know.”
“Everybody’s got shit in their past,” Buddy said, shrugging.
“Not like this,” Symmes said. He raised the mug to his mouth to drink, but his hands shook badly and coffee sloshed onto the countertop. He plucked a napkin from a metal dispenser on the counter and mopped up the spill. “I did things. In my personal life, my professional life. I hurt people.” He looked directly at Buddy. “People died. Because of things I did. Or didn’t do.”
“You’re saying you killed people?”
“Indirectly.”
“Any way you can make things right? Like they tell you in AA? What’s it called? Making amends?”
“I’m trying,” Robinette said. “But it’s not that easy. My own family…” He let the sentence trail off and then die. He shrugged. “I know it’s probably too late, but I have to try, don’t I?”
Buddy gave that some thought. “I think once you’ve come to terms with what you’ve done, you have to figure out how to forgive yourself. And that’s easier said than done.”
Symmes glanced down at his watch. “I’d better go. If Vanessa wakes up and finds me gone again, there’ll be hell to pay. She doesn’t think I should be driving with my, uh, condition. She worries, you know?”
He stood, cleared his throat, and the waitress rushed over. “Anything else?”
“No, thanks.” He put a twenty-dollar bill on the counter between the two coffee cups. “That should take care of things for my friend and me.”
He clapped Buddy on the shoulder. “I’ve enjoyed our talk tonight, Buddy. But that’s not your real name, right?”
Buddy’s face froze, and his gut pinged. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Deejays always have made-up names, right? Like Wolfman Jack? I mean, who’s really named Buddy Bright? I was just wondering what your real name is. No offense.”
“Off the record?”
Robinette nodded.
“It’s Richard,” he said. “Take care of yourself, okay?”
* * *
Buddy had been back to the Waffle House half a dozen times since that night, but he hadn’t run into Robinette again. Until tonight. The Escalade was speeding and weaving back and forth, crossing the centerline of the two-lane road.
Buddy hung back, wondering if the old man was drunk or sick or both. He glanced down at his cell phone. Should he call somebody, let them know an
impaired driver was on the road? What if somebody had done that for him three decades earlier? No, it was no good wondering about that stuff. The past was the past. And anyway, he’d learned the hard way that you can’t really save people from themselves.
9
“We’ll take your car,” Skelly announced when they were in the parking lot. “I’ll get somebody at the store to ride me out here in the morning to pick up my truck.”
“You sure?”
“Positive.”
She smiled. “I don’t care what Danielle thinks. You’re a good guy, Sean Kelly.”
He started the car, they turned onto the county road, and she leaned back against the headrest and closed her eyes.
“What about you?” he said suddenly. “Still unattached?”
Conley sighed heavily. “I was actually living with a guy. Another reporter at the paper. Dumb move on my part, getting involved with a colleague.”
“And?”
“And nothing. I was supposed to be moving to D.C. this week. He thought I cared more about my career than I did about our relationship.”
“Did you?”
“He felt threatened by my success,” Conley said. “Like it was some kind of a crime that I wanted to pursue success instead of staying in Atlanta with him.”
Skelly shook his head but said nothing.
“What? You think I should have turned down a fabulous career opportunity because of a guy? Typical.”
He shot her a look. “I didn’t say that.”
“He could have found a job in D.C. if he was really committed to the relationship. But he wouldn’t even try,” Conley insisted.
“But you ended up not moving to Washington after all,” Skelly pointed out. “So the whole thing is a moot point, right?”
“No.”
She couldn’t explain to him how it was with Kevin, because she couldn’t really explain it to herself.
Instead, she pressed her forehead against the window and looked out at the passing scenery. There were no streetlights in this part of the county, just a nearly full moon overhead, lending a ghostly silver iridescence to the green cotton and soybean fields interspersed with acres of scrub pine and palmetto.
Hello, Summer Page 6