by M. O'Keefe
It really was a pretty spot. And now it seemed sad.
“We don’t have a towel,” he said. “But you can use my shirt.”
He handed the red cotton out to her, but still didn’t look at her.
“Dylan,” she breathed, naked and shivering in the sunlight.
“I don’t know,” he snapped. “Maybe between us, right now, yes, this is the way it is.”
“I don’t like it,” she said.
“Me neither.”
She sucked in a reedy, small breath and then another. And still another. She forced herself to pull on her clothes.
You wanted the truth, she thought. It’s your own damn fault for thinking it would be happy.
DYLAN
Well, that was just fucking perfect, asshole.
I stepped into my pants, jerking them up my wet legs. They got stuck, and I swore and wrestled my body into them.
Way to keep your distance. Way to give her time. Shoving your finger up her ass and fucking her without a condom is just an excellent way of making sure she’s all right.
“You ready?” I asked, trying not to snap. Trying in fact to sound kind, because I felt like I kept kicking a damn puppy.
Only Annie wasn’t acting like a puppy. She was outraged. And stomping through the cattails with her back straight and her head held high.
I was the goddamn puppy.
Her damp clothes clung to her skin, the bright white tips of her hair dripped.
“Annie—”
“Go to hell, Dylan,” she snapped.
I think I am already there.
She was across the field and on the mower before I could catch up and I didn’t know what I would say to her if I did.
All I wanted to do was help. Keep her safe.
And I couldn’t be fucking it up more.
I turned onto the little bridge and headed back over toward our trailers.
“Hey,” a man said, and I spun. Standing at the edge of Annie’s trailer was a man with blond hair and a jaw like a cartoon superhero.
I was slow, admittedly because I’d had my brain melted by Annie in that swimming hole, but it finally clicked.
Hero Cop was here. From the hospital.
“Hey,” I said, trying to hide both my extreme dislike for the guy and my sudden panic that something might have gone wrong in the investigation. “Everything okay?”
“I didn’t know you were living here,” the cop said. “In your statement you said you lived outside of Asheville.”
“I own the trailer park,” I said. “That was in my statement, too.”
“Right,” he said, smiling a little like he’d made a dumb mistake, but I knew a fishing expedition when I saw one. “I’m looking for Annie. Have you seen her?”
I’ve seen her, asshole. I’ve seen more of her than you ever will.
“Grant!” It was Annie coming around the edge of the trailer. Her shirt clung to her breasts and she must have known it, because she flapped it away from her body and then crossed her arms over her chest. But I had to give the guy credit; he didn’t stare. He didn’t even look. He kept his eyes right on hers.
“I mean…Officer Davies. What are you doing here?” she asked. “Is there some kind of problem with the case?”
“No. Not at all. The District Attorney is still reviewing it. I heard you were discharged from the hospital and I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”
Her face made that kind of stunned, “oh my gosh, aren’t you sweet” expression and I couldn’t stand there and watch her get charmed by the cop and I couldn’t punch him in the face, so I turned away and walked around my trailer, only to find Ben standing next to the opened hood of a twenty-year-old Toyota that was more rust than metal.
“So?” Hero Cop asked, his voice easily carrying to where Ben and I were standing. “Are you okay?”
“What are you doing?” Ben asked.
“Shhhhh,” I said.
“I’m fine,” Annie answered. “Really. I did a little work and it felt good, you know. Being outside. Getting something accomplished.”
“You’re like a groundskeeper or something…?”
“Yeah, I guess you could say that. I mowed part of a field today.”
“That’s good work,” he said without the slightest hint of pandering. “Immediate gratification.”
“Exactly,” she said, like he’d read her mind. A half hour ago I’d stood next to her on that tractor and given her shit for wanting to work. Pretending that I didn’t understand the effect of a little honest labor so that I could keep throwing up smoke screens between us.
Useless drama that wasn’t going to get us anywhere.
“You spying on your girlfriend?” Ben whispered.
“No,” I whispered back. It was such a bullshit, knee-jerk response that Pops rolled his eyes at me. Slowly, he crept past me up to the edge of the trailer.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I whisper-yelled at him.
Pops shushed me.
“Are you five?” I asked him.
“I…I uh…I brought you something,” Hero Cop said, and I stopped pretending and stepped up next to Pops, watching Annie and the cop through the green leaves of the flowers planted in the pots where the wheels of her trailer would be.
Spying on my girlfriend, for lack of a better word, with my old man. Because I was making nothing but excellent decisions lately.
Hero Cop pulled a book out of his back pocket, sort of folded and dog-eared. Something that had seen some wear. He held it out to her.
With reverent hands she took it, unfolding it to read the cover. It must have been surprising, because her eyes flew up to his.
“I…I don’t want to sound presumptuous or anything,” the cop said. “But two years back, I shot a man. A…well, a kid, really. It was an armed robbery and he had a hostage and…” He shook his head. “I had to talk to someone afterward, you know…a shrink…It’s kind of protocol. And she told me to read this book.”
“Grant,” she sighed. The tone of her voice sent nails into my spine. She talked to me that way, with gratitude and affection and just a little bit of grief. I didn’t want to be jealous. Jealousy was a stupid emotion and I’d burned through it years ago.
But I couldn’t pretend I liked that she talked to Grant that way.
Pops shot me a knowing look over his shoulder and I didn’t like that, either.
“And it helped,” Hero Cop said. “Like really helped. There’s some parts that have notes I wrote down and I highlighted some stuff. You can ignore it. I mean…”
“Thank you,” she breathed, holding the book to her chest. “So much.”
The cop laughed, his face bright red, a bead of sweat creeping down from his ear to the collar of his shirt. “Well, I know you like books. And I put my number in there. Home and cell. If you ever want to talk.”
It was awkward and just about the sweetest goddamn thing I’d ever seen.
I walked away until I couldn’t hear their voices, giving the two of them some privacy.
A few minutes later I heard Annie’s door open and slam shut.
Hero Cop walked past the edge of the trailer and saw Ben and me standing there like the guilty eavesdroppers we were.
“Well, well,” he said, putting his thumbs in his belt. He had to be sweating his balls off in that uniform. “It’s the Daniels family of felons. You’re just missing Max, right?”
Ben and I were silent.
“See,” Hero Cop stepped closer to us, “here’s the thing, Dylan. Despite all that money of yours, you’re still a Daniels. You still come from a family of murderers and scumbags. But you’re smart. And because you’re smart, you know you’re only going to drag her down.”
“Fuck off,” Ben said.
“Excuse me?” Hero Cop stepped closer.
“No one asked you,” Ben said, and I pushed him back toward the car he’d been working on.
“Ignore him,” I said. Because the last thing any of us needed was m
ore trouble.
“You’re bad for her,” Hero Cop said, his blue eyes pinned to mine. “And you know it.” He gave us one more long look and then turned and walked away, back to his cruiser parked by the office.
“Well,” Pops said when the cop was gone. “You gotta put an end to that shit right there.”
I didn’t say anything. Because fuck if the cop wasn’t right.
“Dylan?” Pops said. “You hear me?”
“I heard you. There’s nothing to put an end to,” I said. “It’s just a book.”
“If you really think that, you deserve to lose her.”
Pops bent back over the engine of the old Toyota.
I wasn’t going to trade paint with Hero Cop.
Because he was the kind of guy she should be with. And that killed me, it fucking gutted me, but it was the truth.
“If you’re just gonna stand there with your mouth open, you can help me with your girlfriend’s car,” Ben said.
“What? This is Annie’s?” There were at least twenty things wrong with the thing, and that was just based on glancing under the hood. God, the 93-horsepower engine was so small. Like a toy.
“Barely runs,” Ben said, struggling to lift out the corroded battery.
“Here…give me that,” I said, and took the battery and set it down on the grass beside the driver’s-side front wheel. “You sure you should be doing this?” I asked.
“Doing what?”
“Working on cars.”
“Do you really care?”
I thought my silence spoke volumes.
“A guy’s got to do something,” he said. “Ignition coil is shot.”
“She’ll need a whole new distributor.” I didn’t need to look under the car to see that.
“Might as well throw in a new starter. And the EGR system needs to be cleaned out.”
“You can do that,” I said, joking with the old man about the filthy job before I thought better of it. He smiled up at me and I made sure I was frowning.
“She misses church,” Pops said. We both stared down at that engine like it was all that mattered.
“Yeah. She said.”
“So?”
“So what?”
“So you should take her.”
“Is this relationship advice?” I scoffed.
“It’s human advice. That’s all.”
“Yeah? Human advice?” I let the seething irritation out. I let it just pour right on out all over him. “You feel like an authority on that?”
“No,” he snapped back, no longer pretending to look at the motor. “I’m an authority on mistakes. On regrets. And I’m telling you, take her to church. Help her get right. Be the guy beside her instead of that fucking blond cop with the chin I’d like to break in half, or you’ll lose her. And you will regret that, son. For the rest of your life.”
I didn’t want to acknowledge that any of his words rang with an implacable truth. And I didn’t want to tell him that I was thinking of taking myself out of the race, because I couldn’t be the right guy for her.
Pops’s opinion, right or wrong, did not matter.
“Forget the car,” I told him, angry for some reason to see him working on that hopeless engine. I had every resource in the world. Money, people, time. But I could not give it to anyone here. “I’ll have someone bring her one of mine.”
“She asked me to fix it,” he said, not looking up from the beat-up four-cylinder engine. “I’m going to listen to what she wants. You might consider doing the same, son.”
“Oh, fuck you, Pops. You can’t fix the past by getting Annie to love you. And don’t call me ‘son,’ ” I said, and went back to my trailer.
But the ghosts only followed.
—
I forgot about Margaret coming, and the knock on the door threw me out of a nap I hadn’t meant to take.
“Hey,” I said, opening the door to let her in.
She stood there surrounded by a moat of her favorite cloth grocery bags. “This place is a shit hole,” she said.
Maybe it was the nap, or the thing with Hero Cop, but I was inordinately happy to see her and her grocery bags and judgmental eye.
“Well, it’s my shit hole. Come on in.” She came inside and eyed the trailer like it was the scene of a crime.
“Really?” she asked. “All that money you got and you can’t get her out of here?”
“I’m trying.” Though my efforts were totally suspect.
“Not hard enough,” she muttered, and handed me the backpack where I kept my laptop and mobile office things.
I started setting up my office at the dinette table. The guys were holding down the fort at the garage and sending me the results on the engine testing, but the software wasn’t on my phone.
Blake had come to the hospital that first night, storming into my room demanding justice and ice chips and a better room, like the old friend he was. What he couldn’t get done with his Southern-boy charm, he got done with money. But since I’d emailed to tell him I’d be staying at the trailer park, he’d reverted to frustrated business partner.
I didn’t blame him, but there wasn’t much I could do. Annie and her safety came before all things.
Once the laptop was booting up, I opened one of the other bags to help Margaret unload food.
I could feel her sideways glance. “What are you doing?” she asked.
“Helping you unload stuff.”
“You feeling all right?” she asked.
I ignored her. Was I really such a dick that I’d never helped her unload groceries?
Probably.
“That one is not for you.” Margaret stopped me as I pulled a book out of one of the bags.
It was a UNC course book. “You going back to school?”
Margaret took it out of my hands and put it back in the bag. And then, as if that wasn’t good enough, she took the bag and put it over by the door. “That’s my granddaughter’s course book. I’m giving it to Annie.”
Annie and college.
Damn. Of course. Leave it to Margaret to think of exactly the right thing.
“That’s a real good idea.”
Everyone was doing a better job of looking after Annie than I was.
Annie should go to college. She would soak up education and knowledge and opportunity like she did everything else. In fact, Annie and Margaret’s granddaughter were probably not that far apart in age. They could be friends.
Grant the Hero Cop could visit her on weekends.
It was the future she should have.
I took my kit bag into the bathroom, where it was all I could do not to heave it against the mirror just to see it shatter. Just to see something break.
Blake’s brother, Phil, had done that at the shop, taken a ratchet set and thrown it against the wall. It had been the final straw for Phil.
Phil.
Oh shit.
Phil. Blake’s brother. Margaret’s son. The black-sheep loser of the family. The black-sheep loser who’d repeatedly hurt Margaret. And I’d asked her to come here, knowing he was here.
So fucking selfish.
We didn’t talk about this stuff. Blake did a little, when he’d asked me to give his brother a chance, for Margaret’s sake. But in the years that I’d known Margaret, in the years that she’d welcomed me into her home, taken care of me like one of her own, we didn’t talk about Phil and the destruction he left behind.
Because it was too personal. Too hard. And I didn’t want to be witness to Margaret’s pain. To anyone’s pain.
And because of that I’d brought her here, where she could be hurt all over again.
I came out of the bathroom and watched Margaret try to jigsaw things into my tiny fridge.
“Phil lives here,” I said. “Or he did.”
Margaret stiffened for just a moment, just a tiny indication that she was surprised or hurt. It gutted me.
“My dad used Phil’s phone to call me about Annie, which means he lives here. Or
used to.”
“Blake told me.”
“I haven’t seen him,” I told her. “I mean I haven’t been looking…” I had, in all that had happened, totally forgotten about Phil. But looking at Margaret, it was obvious that she hadn’t. That she’d driven here thinking she might see him again.
I couldn’t imagine how that must have hurt.
“It’s okay.” I knew she would say that and part of me wanted to let it go, let that little platitude stand. But it wasn’t right.
“No. It’s not. I’m sorry. I forgot about him and then brought you here where you might see him.”
She cocked her head at me and smiled. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you apologize.”
“Of course you have.”
“No.” She shook her head. “I haven’t. It’s nice. And Phil…” She sighed. Looking at her in the tiny kitchen, her blond-gray hair back in its frizzy bun, her capable hands working, constantly working, like a magician using distraction, I could see her broken heart. “He…he never wanted anyone to see all the parts of his life. He kept everything separate. All the time. And that included me. Since he was in grade school he made it clear he doesn’t want me in his life. He made that clear when you fired him. If he saw me here, I imagine he’d just look the other way.”
“I really wished it had worked out,” I said. “The job. I wish we’d been able to give him a new start. Like you and Miguel gave me.”
Margaret leaned back against the counter. “I have three children, Dylan. And all of them made mistakes. But Blake and Christine, they’re good people who at one time in their lives did bad things. Phil…He was always mean. Always a victim. Nothing was ever good enough for him. Certainly not me. And I tried, Dylan. For years I tried, but he is not interested in being my son. And I don’t think it will ever stop hurting or I’ll ever stop feeling like I could have done more, but at some point you just have to understand you can’t make it happen. You can’t force yourself on someone who doesn’t want you no matter if they’re family.”
“I know,” I said.
“I watched you for that year after you got out of jail,” she said. “I watched you trying to stay connected with Max despite how he kept pushing you away. Miguel used to want to try to stop you from doing it. Forbid you from contacting your brother or trying to go and see him—”