Feeding Gators: Book 1 in the Shiner's Bayou Series

by Gen Anne Griffin

  “Okay,” Jo nodded. “That’s reasonable, I guess. If you’re going to go to all the trouble of building it yourself, you might as well have it your way.”

  “Jo, I realized today that this is the only thing in my entire life that I’ve had my way,” he said, feeling slightly better as he let his private thoughts out into the open air between them.

  “What do you mean?” Jo asked.

  “You kind of nailed it last night. Everything about me is the result of being Joshua Walker’s grandson. My entire life up until this point has been nothing more than following the instructions that other people give me. I can design and draft blueprints for a house. I love doing it. But I work stocking shelves and running a cash register in my Pappy’s hardware store because that’s what I’m supposed to do.” Cal took a deep breath and twisted his hands around a thick caramel colored brick he’d been playing with.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” he continued. “It pays well. Twice as well as it should, according to Google. I’m grateful to know that I’ll always have a job, but I don’t think I want to spend the rest of my life selling couplings and stick-on tile.” Cal shrugged and stared up into the dusky, evening sky at the pale moon. “You know, no one ever even asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, or if I wanted to go to college. It was just a given that I’d stay here and work in the store, just like Dad did.”

  “Okay,” Jo nodded slightly and pursed her lips. He knew she’d been expecting him to talk about Gracie and he supposed he’d have to get around to that eventually, but first she had to know where he stood. “You’re really not happy with the job?” she asked.

  “I’m not really happy with my life. I hate the job. I’m bored out of my mind with it.” It was the first time he’d actually said it out loud. It felt like blasphemy, but it felt right.

  Jo whistled softly. “You think you’re gonna quit?” she asked.

  “Maybe. I’ve got to figure out what else I want to do, first. I’m thinking about going back to school,” he said.

  “I think it’s a good idea,” Jo surprised him. “I’ve been thinking about doing it too, actually. College didn’t make sense when I graduated. Matt had just been diagnosed with cancer and Mom needed me to help her take care of him, Junior and the house. Now that he’s more-or-less in remission he and Mom said they’d help me if I wanted to go ahead and go.”

  “Do it,” Cal said. “You’re good at anything you put your mind to. I know that much from experience.”

  “Thanks,” she said softly. Jo Beth was beautiful when she smiled.

  They sat in the darkness and watched one another. Cal found himself comparing her serene beauty to Gracie’s. Jo was pretty enough, but she’d never hold a candle to Gracie in his eyes. It had been incredibly stupid and cruel of Cal to expect her to try.

  Gracie. The memory of Gracie standing in David’s front yard in broad daylight with her arms wrapped around his skinny waist was permanently burned into Cal’s brain. He rubbed his forehead and sighed. “About Gracie, earlier.”

  Jo held up one hand. “I need to apologize about that. It just freaked me out, seeing her driving your truck. I mean, I know you’ve always had feelings for her and probably always will. I just kind of flipped out.”

  Cal smiled. “Apology accepted, though I’m sure Addy would appreciate one too.”

  She blushed in the darkness. “He told you I yelled at him?”

  “He hunted us down right after you talked to him. He really didn’t know what was going on Jo; he had no idea Gracie was in town until you told him. He was every bit as mad as you were,” Cal told her. “I got my ass reamed.”

  “Oh.” Jo gave him an apologetic look and then stared down at her hands. “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t think he was any more ready to hear that Gracie and David have been sleeping together than I was to see it,” Cal said.

  “He...what?” Jo’s eyes nearly bugged out of her head. “Gracie and David?”

  Cal nodded.

  “David Breedlove?”

  He nodded again. “Yeah, apparently they’ve been sleeping together since a couple months after she and I broke up. That’s the story they told me and Addy anyway.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Jo shook her head skeptically.

  “I wish I were,” he said. “I don’t get it. He’s my best friend and all, but Christ, what’s the appeal in David?”

  He’d asked rhetorically, but Jo answered the question.

  “He’s got the whole bad-boy biker thing going on. Gracie is the type of girl who likes excitement,” Jo said.

  Cal frowned, but gestured for her to continue.

  “Gracie’s the type of person that takes risks and gets off on the adrenaline. My guess would be that his animal magnetism appeals to her. He’s still calm enough he’ll protect her and keep her safe, but he’s wild enough for her to get a thrill off it,” Jo explained. “Plus he makes for good eye- candy without his shirt on.”

  “David?” Cal was a bit disgusted by her using the words David and eye-candy in the same sentence. “I would have thought the alligator and skulls he has tattooed on his chest would have canceled that out.”

  “For me? You’re right. But tattoos aren’t a turn off for everyone,” Jo shrugged simply.

  Cal scowled. “I still don’t understand it.”

  “Me neither, really.” She stopped for a moment. “But the girls at work have talked about it at length and we’ve decided that-. It hurts you, doesn’t it?” she asked abruptly.

  “I broke his nose when I caught them together,” Cal admitted with more than a little bit of shame.

  Jo’s jaw dropped.

  “You did what?” she asked.

  “I walked in to his house and caught them just about naked,” he revealed. “I flipped out; David tried to talk to me, and I punched him. His nose is the size of a baseball, and he’s got a couple of black eyes. I’m not proud of it either.”

  “Ouch,” she said, putting her hand on his arm. “You really love her, don’t you?”

  Cal sat silently for a moment before he spoke, sounding resigned. “It doesn’t matter. She doesn’t feel the same way.”

  Jo rested her chin on his shoulder for a moment. “She cares about you,” she said finally. Cal raised an eyebrow.

  “That’s why she’s always makes me so nervous,” Jo admitted, staring into the night sky. “Because I know you love her, and that she loves you. I don’t know why she won’t tell you that, but it’s obvious from the way she gravitates towards you whenever you’re around. She’s got to be near you, got to ride in the center of your truck,” Jo sighed. “I know that if she ever tells you she loves you again, you’d leave me in a heart-beat.”

  “Jo,” Cal took a deep breath. “That’s not-.”

  “Don’t tell me it’s not true, because even if you didn’t leave you would want to leave and resent me because you’d felt you had to stay. You’re too nice of a guy to abandon your obligations and break your promises.”

  “Jo. I’m sorry.” He hadn’t known she’d felt this way. It made him feel extremely guilty. Especially for all the times he’d been with her and wished she was Gracie instead of Jo Beth.

  He hoped she didn’t truly know how many of those moments there had been.

  She shook her head at him. “You’re a good guy, Cal. I think you started dating me so you could get over Gracie, but I’d bet money that she’s still the first thing on your mind in the morning and the last thing on your mind right before you go to sleep at night.”

  Cal didn’t argue. He’d had no idea he was that transparent. “If you thought that, why did you stay?” he asked.

  She almost laughed. “Because the other twenty-three and a half hours a day when you weren’t thinking about her, you really were a good boyfriend. Though I don’t honestly think it’s meant to be,” She sighed and took a deep breath and Cal felt a wash of relief go through him, lifting off a burden he hadn’t known he was carrying.

 
; “I think you should go after her,” she told him.

  “Go after Gracie?” he stared at her. “She’s with David.”

  “Do you really believe that?” Jo asked. “It seems really bizarre. Especially since both of them are so hotheaded. I have serious doubts about whether or not those two could put up with one another for one month, let alone six months.”

  He frowned, then shook his head and shrugged.

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” Jo was tapping her foot on one of the bricks and looking thoughtful. “Didn’t she go to her senior prom with some random kid?”

  “She didn’t go with me,” Cal said, not mentioning that he’d hated missing it.

  “She didn’t go with David either. That would have been the talk of the town. I bet he would have worn mechanics coveralls instead of a tuxedo.”

  “She definitely didn’t go to prom with David,” Cal said. “I feel like I should be looking back and seeing some obvious clues that the two of them were involved with one another, but I’m not remembering anything remotely sexual between them. It’s not like she was spending more time around the shop after we split up or anything like that. I would have noticed if she’d buddied up with David.”

  “From what I remember, Gracie seemed to spend most of the last few months before she went away to college holed up with her Granny Pearl. She kept to herself a lot after y’all split up.”

  Cal frowned. What Jo was saying matched what he remembered. For no reason, Cal suddenly found himself thinking about shiny silver BMW he and David had cut up into bite size pieces and then buried under several tons of thick, black muddy soil. The first car he’d ever seen David pass up making a profit on.

  He quickly pushed all thoughts of the BMW out of his mind. He didn’t want to know where that car had come from or why David was so eager to get rid of it that he didn’t care about making money. He didn’t care.

  “I have to have missed something,” Cal said with depressed shrug. “Or maybe I’m just that big of an idiot.”

  “You’re not an idiot,” Jo Beth told him.

  “Why do I keep screwing things up?” Cal asked. She didn’t have an answer to that. Instead she took her time studying the layout of the half-built house that surrounded them.

  “I guess this is it for us, huh?” She asked after a long hesitation.

  “I don’t know what I want,” Cal told her.

  “Liar,” she said. “You want Gracie.”

  “Gracie won’t have me,” he pointed out. He wasn’t able to keep the bitterness out of his voice. “She’d rather have David.”

  “Have you considered that maybe that’s what she wants you to think?”

  “You think she’s dating David to piss me off?”

  “It’s possible,” Jo said with a sad smile. “Maybe she thinks that if she makes you mad enough, you’ll reconsider whatever it was that made y’all split up in the first place.”

  “What if I’m not even sure what the hell it was I did to piss her off in the first place?” Cal asked. Truth of the matter was, he didn’t remember what exactly had started the fight that had wrecked the only relationship that had ever really mattered to him. He just remembered standing in the moonlight next to a bonfire with battle lines drawn in the grass and neither one of them had been willing to budge on their point of view. Cal wished he could go back in time and smack himself senseless. He’d made a choice between his stubborn pride and Gracie. It had been the wrong choice.

  “They say that whatever doesn’t kill you will make you stronger,” Jo leaned her head on his shoulder, and he wrapped one arm around her waist. As they sat in a sad but companionable silence watching the sun fade to black and the stars light up in the night sky, he realized he was going to miss her.

  *

  David handed Gracie a wad of cash as they pulled up to the Walmart Supercenter in Canterville.

  “I’ll wait in here,” he told her, sliding the battered little Toyota into a parking spot in the third row. She thumbed through the bills, four hundred dollars total. Her eyes widened.

  David made a shooing gesture with his hand. “Go play. Have fun. Buy enough to last you through the weekend, but try not to take forever.”

  “You’re not coming with me?” Gracie asked.

  “You know I can’t stand crowds. Walmart on a Saturday night?” David shook his head and shuddered. “I barely like going to the diner.”

  “You’re starting to become a recluse, David. You need to get out more.”

  “Well, now that we’re a couple I guess you can work on that.” He grinned at her, the sarcasm practically dripping from his voice and Gracie laughed. It was the first time she’d laughed all day and she was grateful for his attempts to make her smile.

  “You’re a damned good friend,” she told him.

  “Shame I make for such a lousy boyfriend.” He reached for the dial on the radio, changing it from a modern country station to one that was playing Johnny Cash’s Ring Of Fire. “Hurry up. Get what you need, and let’s get out of here. I hate being in town.”

  “Consider me gone,” Gracie rolled her eyes, pocketed the cash he had given her and headed towards the store. Unfortunately she caught sight of Addison the moment she walked past the obligatory elderly greeter.

  Her older brother was leaning against the Subway counter, chatting up the sandwich artist. Gracie wrinkled her nose. Addison didn’t look much better than he had earlier in the afternoon. His uniform shirt was wrinkled beyond hope, and his pants looked as if he’d been sleeping in them for the last week.

  Directly to Addison’s left was a man who had to be the infamous Twitchy Eddie. He was short; his head barely came up to Addison’s shoulder. His crisply ironed uniform was at least two sizes too big. No amount of tucking in was going to make the shirt fit. The edges of the sleeves fell off both of Eddie’s shoulders. The extra lumps from the bilious fabric added to the slight gut he was carrying. Twitchy Eddie wasn’t so much fat as he was soft. He looked like he’d never dug a ditch or skinned a deer in his life.

  Gracie wasn’t in the mood for another fight with Addison, so she decided to try and slip past him without catching his attention. She ducked her head as she walked rapidly past the fast food restaurant. She was hoping she could make it to the first aisle of the pharmacy before Addison noticed her. It didn’t work.

  “Gracie!” Addison called her name before she’d made it two steps past Subway. When she turned around, he made a snapping ‘come here’ gesture with his fingers.

  Gracie took a deep breath and walked over to her big brother with a fake, toothy smile on her face. Addison matched the smile, turned up the voltage and hugged Gracie so tightly that her back popped four or five times before he released her. She pressed her forehead against his chest and he rested his chin against the top of her head.

  “Thanks,” Gracie muttered. “My back feels better now.”

  “You’re welcome.” Addison wrapped his arms around Gracie’s waist. “What are you doing here?”

  “I just needed to pick up a couple of things.” Gracie tried her best to look as innocent as possible. If Addison hadn’t noticed that she was wearing David’s clothes then she wasn’t about to bring it to his attention. She knew he was still mad at her, but she wasn’t sure how mad. “Forgot my toothbrush, you know.”

  “I wasn’t referring to Walmart,” Addison clarified.

  “Oh.” Gracie lifted her head and frowned up at her big brother. She desperately wanted to tell him the truth, even though David had told her not to. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand David’s logic, it was just that she’d never hidden anything from Addison in her entire life. “Um, well.”

  “Ahem.” Twitchy Eddie appeared like magic, standing a couple of inches away from Addison’s left elbow. His lips were puckered in a tight frown and his brow was furrowed. The man practically radiated disapproval. “I don’t think it’s appropriate to be cuddling your girlfriend in public while you’re in uniform.”

 
“Excuse me?” Addison narrowed his eyes and started to release Gracie, his fist clenched tightly at his side. Gracie tightened her grip on his neck.

  “Sister,” Gracie said. She shot a pointed glare at Twitchy Eddie. “I’m his sister.”

  “Really?” Eddie looked the two of them up and down doubtfully. “You don’t look like his sister.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Addison pulled out of Gracie’s grip, reducing her hold on him to a single hand clutching his elbow. “We’re damned near fucking identical. Most people who don’t know us personally think we’re twins.”

  Gracie forced herself to smile at Eddie. “He’s right, you know. We have the same eyes, same nose, same lips, same face shape, same skin tone, same build, pretty much same everything except the whole gender thing. We look a lot like our Momma.”

  “It’s still not appropriate to be hugging in public,” Eddie said smugly.

  Addison started to raise his fist. Gracie dug her fingernails into his arm. “Not here, Bubby. Bad idea.”

  “See, even she agrees with me,” Eddie apparently didn’t realize that Addison was approximately two seconds away from ruining Eddie’s truly exquisite dental work.

  “Not here,” Addison repeated and then nodded. He turned his focus back to Gracie. “Where’s your lover boy?”

  “Truck.” She barely flinched when she said it.

  “He might as well have come inside with you. It’s not you two have to worry about hiding your relationship. Anymore.” Addison scowled at her. Boy, was he in a lousy mood. She wondered how different his behavior would be right now if he had been the one to answer the phone last night instead of David.

  “I don’t really have anything to say to you about my relationship,” Gracie swallowed the lump in her throat and forced herself to remain calm. David’s reasons for not confiding in Addison were sound. One glance at Twitchy Eddie, standing beside Addy and clearly hanging on to every word that passed between them, confirmed that David was undoubtedly making the right choice. Gracie would never forgive herself if she cost Addison his job. Or his freedom.

  Or his sanity, which seemed to be one of David’s concerns.