As she slid behind the counter, she looked up and cursed. Big Jim, Deanna’s husband, was on his way over for his weekly date with a gun he’d probably never be able to buy. The Taylors were determined to follow her tonight. Lucy punched in her code and slid the key to the gun counters out. She had the door open by the time Big Jim strolled up.
“This one again?” she asked.
He nodded, his eyes full of reverence for the grained silver body and matte metal finish on the semi-automatic. The gun looked almost puny in Big Jim’s arms. His name was honestly given: he was six-four, if an inch, and must have weighed close to three hundred pounds. He worked at the ammunition plant fifteen minutes down the road and spoke just enough to have risen up to manager over there. Lucy wouldn’t have called him gentle, but he was a quiet man. She could never figure how he or anyone put up with Deanna.
“This the week?” she asked. He had been coming to check out the gun nearly every Saturday night since it’d come in. Even Lucy had to acknowledge it was beautiful. But it cost over a thousand dollars, an amount that took Lucy’s breath away every time she saw the tag.
“Maybe,” Big Jim said. He only had eyes for the gun. He turned it this way and that, then hoisted it to his shoulder and peered through the scope, tracking one of the dozen or so captive sparrows flitting between the warehouse’s metal struts. He brought it down with a sigh and laid it on the counter, his fingers caressing the grain of the butt like it was a woman he’d finally and inexplicably gotten to lay down in his bed.
“It’s a beauty,” Lucy said. She would love to close this sale, get Big Jim to buy this gun so he’d stop coming to the counter every week. She wanted as few interactions with the whole Taylor family as it was possible to achieve in this small town.
Big Jim tore his eyes away from the gun and looked up at Lucy. “Hear you’re working with Jeptha over at Judy’s.”
“I mean, I wouldn’t say working with. He plays there.”
“Plays there,” Big Jim huffed. “That sounds about like him. Getting paid to play.”
Lucy nodded, not sure what to say.
“Least it gets him off the farm. Be easier on all us if he weren’t involved at all,” he said.
“Doesn’t he do most of the tobacco?” Lucy asked, curious despite herself.
Big Jim laughed, rough and low. “That what he said?”
“I don’t really talk to him, to be honest.”
“Wise choice. He does some. But mostly he’s drunk. Gets out in the field at ten thirty, works for an hour, then passes out for the afternoon. Kills Deanna we have to split anything with him.”
“Does Deanna work the field too?”
Big Jim really laughed now. “You’re funny. My wife would as soon ride an elephant as work in the fields. She does the books, insurance, and whatnot.”
“Oh,” Lucy said. She’d never heard Big Jim string so many words together.
“Does more than Jeptha, though. That’s for sure. That kid ain’t worth shit.”
“That’s what people say,” Lucy said, thinking of LouEllen’s take on Jeptha from a few weeks back.
“People ain’t wrong.”
If this is what having family was, Lucy thought, maybe she and the baby were better off on their own. Or with LouEllen.
Big Jim slowly took his fingers away from the gun and shook his head. “Not today, I reckon. One day.”
Lucy picked up the gun by the base of the barrel and loaded it into the counter behind her.
“Anything else?” she said as she locked it. She heard the rhythmic plop of flip-flops coming up behind him and looked up to see Deanna.
“You work guns too?” Deanna said, gnashing a piece of gum like a cow with cud.
“On Saturdays,” Lucy muttered. Her stomach had done a sudden violent turn, and it wasn’t the return of Deanna that had done it. She felt green and hot all over and had to clench her jaw to keep her dinner down.
“Excuse me,” Lucy mumbled. “I don’t feel good.” She ran out from behind the counter, her hand clamped over her mouth.
“Mm-hmm,” Deanna said. “I bet you don’t.”
Lucy glanced back at Deanna long enough to see the malicious glint in her eye. She knew.
5
IT WAS A RARE thing indeed when Deanna deigned to enter the tobacco fields, but when Jeptha wiped his forehead, there she was, picking her way down the hill to where he and Bobby were working. She usually kept herself as far as possible from the land, as if the whole farm, their childhood, and the house she lived in hadn’t come up as a result of the dirt she so studiously avoided. His sister was as prissy as she was mean. She was tiptoeing through the grass like it would infect her. He had no great love for working the fields, but he was damn sure it wasn’t going to kill him.
He saw someone beside her and peered through the thick long leaves of the tobacco stalks to see if her kids had come with her. Jim Ed and Cassie Ann were his blood, but Jeptha had never had an affection, much less an affinity, for them. Jeptha thought all six-year-olds liked playing outside. But not his sister’s kids. Except for school, they almost never left the house during the day. They liked it that way—eating crap and watching TV. They would come by every once in a while when he was playing his mandolin on his porch but soon start sneaking glances back at their house, scratching at their arms and kicking their feet at the grass like meth heads in need of a fix. Without bothering to say goodbye, they’d start walking away, breaking into a run when they got close to their house in order to win their never-ending battle over the remote. He guessed you could call it running—it was as fast as they knew how to move, but God, it was embarrassing to watch them do it.
But it wasn’t the kids coming down with Deanna. It was Marla, Cody’s wife. Her mousy brown hair and short, plump figure stood in sharp contrast to Deanna’s thin, blond, and brittle look, and, as usual, she seemed to be shaking her head in slavish agreement with whatever Deanna was saying. If Marla had ever had an independent thought outside of Deanna, Jeptha wasn’t aware of it. He was fairly sure Cody wasn’t either. Cody never said it out loud, but Jeptha knew he hated the way Marla slobbered all over Deanna, like she was the queen and Marla a lowly servant. Jeptha winced watching them walk down the hill toward him. He was reminded suddenly of how they had once been friends with Lucy, and how that friendship had been the cause of the second most embarrassing moment of his life when it came to Lucy Kilgore.
His belly still roiled with shame when he thought of the day six years ago when he had walked into his parents’ house and seen Deanna lying on the floor with two girls. Deanna had introduced him as “My shithead brother, Jeptha” with a lazy wave of her hand. Lucy said hey with a halfhearted smile on her face and went back to the TV.
At seventeen, Jeptha thought love songs were for losers and poems were shit, so he felt alone and abandoned there on the edge of the living room, swept away suddenly by a strange emotion he didn’t know much about. He wanted Lucy; that was true. He could feel the strain of his penis against his jeans. But there was more than that. He was breathless, lost. He wanted to stare at her, the way her red flip-flop dangled off her right foot as she swung it slowly back and forth, how the tattered cut-off edge of her jean shorts moved slightly with each swing, and how her summer-lit blond hair fell in unbrushed tangles down her back nearly to her belt loops. At that moment, with that “hey,” Jeptha understood the need for an outside resource on love.
He went into his room and turned on the stereo. He had a pretty nice voice—even if he did say so himself—and once he found the song he was looking for, he turned the volume up and sang along. It was one of his favorite songs—he thought it was a summer anthem about drinking beer and driving a truck in the summer, but as he listened to the words today, he realized it was about a girl. He sang out loud and danced around the room in his cowboy hat, wishing that his singing was the kind that could make a girl—Lucy—fall in love with him. He imagined that he was living the song: him and Lucy in a truck, h
is arm around her, driving around on a hot summer day looking for a place to stop and mess around once the sun went down.
He sang the last line at the top of his lungs, ending with a long, drawn-out “chillin’ it.”
Then he heard Deanna’s laugh followed by the titters of the two other girls. The girl he was singing about was laughing at him.
He opened the door, furious and breathing heavy.
“What … were … you … doing?” Deanna asked, every word broken up with laughter. “That was hilarious.”
Marla was laughing too but sneaking glances at Deanna to make sure she didn’t laugh for a second longer or louder than Deanna. Even then, she was like a dog that’s been abused and keeps coming back for more. Lucy stared at Jeptha with a small, private smile on her face. He blushed even harder when he looked at her.
“Jesus, Deanna, what the hell do you want?” he yelled at his sister. “Why don’t you shut up and go back to watching your stupid show?”
“Why? This one’s funnier than that one,” she said, her seventeen-year-old mouth honed for sass and quick comebacks. She’d stop at nothing to make others feel small. It seemed like everyone—from their parents, to Jeptha, to other students at school and even the teachers—knew that words in the hands of a girl as evil as Deanna could hurt no matter how old you were.
“Deanna, shut the hell up,” he said, slamming the door in her face.
He sat down on the bed, near tears, and pulled the cowboy hat off his head. He’d bought it at the saddle and feed store for way more than he could afford. He thought he’d seen a hot country star in its lines on his head. Now though, he saw the terry cloth brim was soaked and graying with grime, the supposedly leather edges were fraying, and the entire structure was caving in on itself. Lucy must have thought he was ridiculous. That little smile wasn’t an interested one, but a mocking one. She had been laughing silently at him, which was so much worse than Marla’s loud hysterics. Lucy got no credit from Deanna for silent mocking. She’d found the whole thing funny. He had no shot with her.
That one encounter, six years before, had convinced Jeptha that Lucy was the girl for him and that there was no chance he would ever get her. He wanted to, God knew, but he wasn’t sure what he, Jeptha Taylor, could bring to the table that would convince her. He had no idea what had changed in her that night at the bar—maybe it was the alcohol—but something had. And then he’d gone and messed it up so much that he wished to God he had never even met her.
Deanna’s wave from the edge of the field caught his eye. He took his time picking his way through the plants and avoided eye contact with Deanna when he arrived in front of them, knowing she’d take it as a sign of disrespect, and wanting her to.
“How’re you, Marla?” he asked.
“All right. Cody said y’all had a good set the other night,” she said.
“I doubt that,” Deanna snorted. Jeptha reacted the same way he always did whenever his sister said something awful, which was pretty much every time she opened her mouth: wish like hell he had a beer to down so he could throw the bottle at her head.
“Gonna make any profit this year?” Deanna asked, looking around at the field, her mouth pinched tight and her nose wrinkled.
“Hope so,” Jeptha said. He pointed down to the end of the field, where the plants were standing tall and lushly green. There were a couple of days in the middle of the season, where, when he stood in the middle of them, he could imagine he was in a rainforest. “We planted more down there, but who knows how much we’ll end up making.”
“Not enough, I’m sure,” Deanna said.
Jeptha shrugged his shoulders. “I can’t say.”
Deanna looked out over the field, her eyes narrowed. Jeptha smiled as he watched a ladybug fly into her hair. She brushed at it and screwed up her mouth when her hand touched it. Deanna raked it out of her hair with such hatred that it was shredded by the time it landed on the ground. “Ugh,” she said, shuddering with disgust. “Can’t the damn things see?”
“Did you get it? Want me to check?” Marla asked.
“Marla, I think I can handle getting a bug out of my own hair.”
Marla looked down, pink spreading from her cheeks up into her hairline and down her part. Jeptha spoke to save her from any further embarrassment.
“Is there something y’all needed? I’m guessing you didn’t come down to jaw about tobacco prices,” Jeptha said.
“Well, we were just talking about some real interesting news, but if you’re busy …” Deanna trailed off.
“What?” Jeptha asked. He wasn’t interested, but he might as well take the break she was offering.
“You want to tell him, Marla?”
Marla looked up then, her face shining with excitement. Gossip was to Marla what the tobacco in the field was to cigarettes. Cody was always complaining about it: like every man Jeptha knew, Cody hated gossip, but his wife was addicted. She spent $25 a week on the shitty magazines full of celebrities trying to pretend they were “just like us,” even as the pictures showed no life Jeptha had ever seen. Marla worked as a hairdresser at Snips ’n’ Bangs. Jeptha thought it was a job like any other, but as it turned out, Marla didn’t much care about hair; she wanted whatever job was at the pinnacle of gossip.
“Well, you know the Cartwrights?” Marla began, her face animated and her hands waving. “Their youngest boy, Travis, he got kicked out of school. For sleeping with a teach—”
“Not that news, Marla,” Deanna interrupted. “Jeptha doesn’t give a shit about the Cartwrights. No one does.”
“Right. But, wait … Oh, the thing you told me? About who you saw at Walmart?” Marla asked. She looked confused for a moment and then she whipped toward Jeptha, her eyes widening with sudden understanding about something.
“Never mind,” Deanna said. She looked at Jeptha. “Lucy Kilgore’s pregnant.”
The color drained from his face. Deanna, Marla, the sun, the tobacco—all seemed to disappear as he tunneled into that word, pregnant. The back seat of his car, the dented headrest came to him, her mouth on his, his pants sliding down. He’d never thought of protection.
“Caught her buying baby clothes. She was going on about buying it for a friend but wouldn’t say who. Finally, I asked if it was for Tonya, and Lucy said yes. Total lie—Tonya’s not even pregnant.”
“Baby clothes? That don’t mean she’s pregnant,” Jeptha said.
“Then she ran off puking a few minutes later. Jim saw it too. Said I looked like that with our kids.”
Jeptha wiped sweat that had nothing to do with the sun off the back of his neck. Did Deanna know about him and Lucy? He didn’t think so, but she played a long game, so it was hard to tell. He knew Bobby wouldn’t have said anything about them going to the Fold—his brother barely spoke if it didn’t concern the farm. From the look on Marla’s face, though, he was pretty sure she knew he’d slept with Lucy, but it didn’t seem like she’d told Deanna. He’d have never thought she had that much restraint. He smiled weakly at her.
“God, I hope it’s true,” Deanna said with a smile on her face. “I hope she’s stuck here—she’s always going on about leaving, like she’s so much better. I hope it was someone awful—”
Deanna stopped and stared at Jeptha for a minute, then shook her head. “Too bad it wasn’t you, Jeptha. You’d have been happy to be the stud horse on that one, God knows. And imagine if she was stuck here. With you? Man, I would love to see that.”
Deanna’s words barely touched Jeptha. He put his hands in his back pockets and looked up at the sun, too shocked to take much of anything in, even his sister’s insults.
“Jeptha?” Deanna said, prodding his shoulder with a long pink fingernail.
“Yeah?” he said.
“Thought you’d be more upset, is all. Sad you missed your chance. Not that you had one, come to think of it.”
Jeptha nodded. Disappointment flashed across Deanna’s face. He imagined she wanted a bigger reaction from h
im—but being called a loser by his sister was everyday fare. The possibility of Lucy Kilgore carrying his baby was not. He had to see her. He had to know if it was true.
“Good to see you, Marla. Tell Cody I’m gonna come by later, maybe borrow his truck.”
“I will,” she said. Deanna stared at both of them, a look of pruned outrage on her face that neither of them had responded the way she’d expected them to. She huffed, rolled her eyes, and walked up the hill.
JEPTHA WORKED LONG enough to see Marla drive off and Deanna close her door behind her, then he walked with long, fast strides to his trailer where his phone was charging. It had died two days before, and he had only this morning gotten around to plugging it in. But now, he couldn’t get it on fast enough. When the screen finally came on, it flashed o MESSAGES. He wavered for a moment, his tobacco-stained thumb hovering over the 4 of Lucy’s phone number, a number he’d had to beg off of Judy. Wouldn’t she have called him if the baby was his? Or maybe she’d wanted to tell him that night at the Fold, but he’d fucked it up entirely. He thought of her in her car, looking wounded and beaten. Despite how loudly she’d been yelling at him, she didn’t even look that angry, just tired. He hit the digits of her number on his phone before he could lose his nerve and waited, clearing his throat for the five rings it took for someone to pick up. He almost hung up when he heard a drawn-out “Hellllooo?” that could only be LouEllen’s. He willed his thumb away from the end button.
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