by Naomi Niles
“I think I’m just about done here,” said Sean. “The fish aren’t biting, and at this point, I don’t think they’re going to. We might as well pack it in.”
But when we reached the store, I didn’t find any melted microwaves or other horrors. What I found instead was something altogether different and surprising.
Instead of one bookshelf, there were now four bookshelves covering most of the back wall. The shelves had been lovingly stocked with hundreds and hundreds of books until there was hardly an empty space left in which to fit more. I stared in disbelief at the sheer number and variety of books on display: paperbacks, hardbacks, mysteries, fantasies, contemporaries. It was like having my own personal library in the back of the shop.
My gaze had been so distracted by the shelves that at first, I didn’t notice how the rest of the shop had been decorated. A large coffee cake sat on a table by the window, pristine and untouched, looking like it had just come out of the oven. Brightly colored flowers and scented candles lined the counter, and in the center of the room sat a plain wooden black chair. The chair was empty but for a single ring in the center.
I turned to face Marshall, hardly able to believe what I was seeing. Nodding, he came forward and wrapped his arms around me while Sean and Sam looked on.
“You like it?” he asked. “I figured it was about time you had your own library.”
“When did you find the time to do all this?” I asked.
“Sam and Jamal and I put it together after you went home last night. This is what I was doing when I told you I was out playing poker with the boys.”
“You were out until nearly midnight.”
Marshall smiled that familiar enigmatic smile. “That’s how long it took. I realize I told a fib, but I hope it won’t jeopardize the future of our relationship. And speaking of that…”
Kneeling down in front of the chair, he reached for the ring that lay there and slipped it onto my finger. “Lori,” he said, “you know I’m not one for big speeches. You’ve got twice the vocabulary that I have, and you’ve probably already read more books than I’ll read in my lifetime.”
“Don’t give up!” I couldn’t help but whisper.
“But I’ll say this,” he pressed on as if there had been no interruption, “you’ve meant more to me than I thought anyone could mean. If I had to choose between you and a million dollars, I would choose you every time, and at this point, I can’t imagine spending the rest of my life with anyone else. Would you marry me?”
Kneeling down at eye level and placing my hands on his shoulders, I kissed him lightly on the mouth. “Of course,” I said. “Of course.”
We rose and rejoined Sean and Sam, who were standing back at a respectful distance, looking misty-eyed. “It’s just like Beauty and the Beast,” Sean pointed out. “When he gave her the library.”
“Well, I hope you don’t think I’m marrying you just because you gave me a library,” I said to Marshall.
“No,” he replied, “but it probably helps.”
“It does,” I laughed, and together, we shared coffee cake and tea.
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TRAILED
By Naomi Niles
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 Naomi Niles
Chapter One
Curtis Savery
I woke up early that morning after a night of bad dreams.
It happened at least once a week. I could see Christine’s face as if we were still married. In this dream, I had been standing on the prow of a ship watching her slip away into dark waters. There were no lifeboats, and my arms weren’t long enough to reach her. I grabbed a rope and threw it over the railing, but it turned into snakes in my hands, writhing and coiling around her.
“Christine!” I had yelled. But Christine did not answer.
I awoke with my stomach in knots, my insides twisted with dread. It took me a moment to realize where I was: back in my own bedroom in Sulphur Springs, warm sunlight pouring in through the windows. There was an empty space on the bed beside me.
As I had learned to do in situations like this, I drew a deep breath and focused on my immediate surroundings. A stone ashtray on the night stand. A small shaded desk lamp. A green batik blanket hanging on one wall. A stuffed elk’s head hanging on the other. A jar of kumquats. A stack of dusty old Merle Haggard CDs, a gift from my dad.
Somehow, I felt reassured by the presence of all these things. Their solidity. Their reality. The dread in my stomach wasn’t real; it was all in my head. Doom wasn’t waiting around the next corner. I didn’t have to prepare for the worst.
The worst had already happened.
Slowly, I rose from the bed and stretched. Even though I had slept all night, I still felt tired. Dad had always instilled in me and my brothers the importance of waking up early and putting in a hard day’s work, but I couldn’t deny there were days when I just wanted to burrow down into the covers and sleep for a week.
I slid easily into a pair of dark jeans and a brown button-down with a paisley pattern. My leather boots took a little longer to put on—either they had shrunk in the year since I had bought them, or I had outgrown them. After a minute’s coaxing, I managed to get them on my heels. As much as I would have preferred tennis shoes, it wasn’t safe to go riding in them at this time of year. Summer was rapidly approaching, and there were snakes everywhere. Small snakes, big snakes, snakes the size of your arm that would kill you as soon as look at you.
I strode to the mirror in the bathroom, doused my neck with cologne, and lightly trimmed my beard. This done, I took a step back and studied my face in the gray light. I looked and felt so much older than my thirty-one years. I was tall, nearly six and a half feet tall, with a lean body and large, calloused hands. On one arm, I had a tattoo of a mermaid, on the other a tattoo of a bucking bronco. A hot feeling of shame flowered in my breast as I looked at them. Christine and I had gotten matching tattoos on a dare one night when we were both drunk and eating hash browns at Waffle House. My rage on waking up the next morning to find both arms covered in tattoos had become the stuff of Savery legend.
As I reached for my hat, my golden retriever came bounding into the room looking excited.
“Mornin’, Jake,” I said as I patted him down. I had named him after a dog in an old country song by the band Pirates of the Mississippi. “You ready to go see Mama?”
Jake barked in excitement, leaving no doubt in my mind that he had understood me. Dogs are funny that way. Every time Jake went over to my mama’s house, which was pretty much every day, she fed him eggs and sausage and bacon and biscuits with gravy and every other food that was fit for canine consumption. “You know, Mama,” I had once told her, “there are people in this world who don’t eat as good as Jake does at breakfast.”
“Well, I want our dogs to have the best,” Mama told me as Jake devoured an enormous pork steak.
A dust-covered ’94 Ford pickup truck sat at the side of the house under a shady awning. I unlocked the driver’s side door and opened the passenger door so that Jake could climb in. I started up the ignition, and together me and the dog drove down the long dirt and gravel path to the rusted red gate at the end of the drive. Once we were on the road, I fired up the CD player and put in an old album of Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings songs. Christine had teased me for being so “retro,” as she put it, in my musical tastes. She loved some of the newer country acts like Luke Bryant and Lady Antebellum, but me, I just couldn’t get into them. “Gimme ol’ Johnny and Hank and Waylon any day of the week,” I had told her.
I disliked visiting Mama’
s house on the mornings after my bad dreams because she could always tell when I had had a troubled night’s sleep. Sure enough, the moment I came through the door that morning with Jake in tow, she looked straight at me with those creased eyes, pointed the wooden spoon that had been the deliverer of many a paddling when we were kids, and said, “You don’t look too good. You sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine, Mom,” I said, coming over and giving her a hug, but she shook her head, unconvinced.
“No, there’s somethin’ wrong; I can tell. Why are there bags under your eyes? Why are your eyes red?”
“I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night. I was up late worrying about things I don’t have any control over.”
“Have you thought about seeing a therapist?”
I laughed. “With the money I make? That’ll be the day.”
But Mama wasn’t having it. “You think I’m joking,” she said with one hand on her hip. “Your aunt Audrey started seeing a grief counselor a couple years ago after Preston died, and it helped her enormously.”
“I don’t need to see no ‘grief counselor,’” I said, practically spitting out the words in contempt. Seeing Jake sniffing around the food bowl, I added, “Why don’t you feed Jake? And then, if there’s anything left over, you can feed me, too.”
“Alright, but don’t think you can distract me that easily,” Mama said as she walked over to the fridge. “I’ve known you for too many years now.”
“Then you ought to know by now how stubborn I am,” I said, taking a seat at the dining-room table and smiling in spite of myself.
“I do,” she said, pulling out a Tupperware container filled with leftover meats and stewed vegetables. “You and your brothers are about as stubborn as they come. I expect you get it from your father.”
I laughed. “Tell yourself that if it helps you sleep at night.”
Mama scowled at me but said nothing. There was a shuffling noise from the hallway, and my dad, a portly, balding man in his late fifties wearing leather boots and a broad-brimmed white Stetson, walked into the room.
“Speaking of brothers,” I said, “you heard from Zach lately?” Zach was the second oldest Savery boy. Growing up, I had always resented him a little for taking away my “only child” status. We had only grown close in our teen years, shortly before Zach enlisted in the Navy.
“Actually, I just heard from him last night,” Dad said as he opened the Dallas Morning News. “He’ll be home on leave in a couple of weeks.”
“Four weeks is what he told me,” said Mama, beginning to warm up the meats in a skillet. “I do wish that boy would get married.”
“It’s hard when you’re a Navy SEAL,” I said, reaching for an orange from the fruit tray. “From what he’s told me, it sounds like they’re too busy to even really think about dating.”
“All the same,” said Mama, “if he came home with a wife, or a girlfriend, I couldn’t say I’d be too upset. He’s about the age you were when you married.”
“He’s gettin’ there,” I said quietly. I didn’t want to say what I was really thinking, which was that I suspected the way mine and Christine’s relationship had ended had put Zach off of dating.
“Just give him some time, Jean,” Dad said. “Things aren’t like they were when we were young. Kids don’t get married fresh out of high school. Just the other day they were saying, for the first time in American history there are more women having their first babies in their thirties than in their twenties.”
Mama shook her head, the way she always did when faced with fresh evidence of the world’s decline. “I don’t know what’s to become of this country. Seems like young people care more about their pets than they do about their kids—if they even have kids.”
“It’s hard to raise a family,” Dad said. “Especially in this economy.”
I gripped my orange juice glass thoughtfully. “That’s one of the big reasons Christine and I waited to have a baby. We got married just a couple years into the recession when you were lucky to find even a decent place to rent. We said, ‘No way are we raising a kid in this economy.’ I think we both wanted one. We talked about having one after the downturn ended; we just… waited too long.”
As I finished talking, I could see both my parents looking at me with pity in their eyes. I felt myself growing red behind the ears; I had said too much.
Dad, perhaps feeling the conversation had grown uncomfortably serious, said, “What have you got going on today?”
“I’ve actually got the rest of the day off,” I said, slapping the table lightly and taking a deep breath. “First day in a long time I haven’t had to do any trail riding. I think I might drive over to Waco with Jake and visit the cattle market, maybe eat lunch in the square, look up a few friends while I’m there.”
“How would you like to help me with the fence?”
“What’s wrong with it?” I asked, not wanting to commit myself.
“Hogs have been digging it up,” he said. “Every morning I go out there, there’s another hole in the dirt under the fence, and a couple more hogs escaped.”
“You sure they’re not being stolen? The Porters installed a surveillance system in their back pasture after some of their lambs went missing last spring. They thought it was coyotes. Turns out, it was some local boys sneaking back there late at night and making off with their lambs strapped around their backs.”
“If it was thieves, I reckon they would just climb over the fence,” Dad said. “You ought to see the holes they’ve dug. Those are definitely hog prints.”
I tapped my hands lightly on the tabletop, thinking. “Yeah, I’ll see what I can do,” I said, not very hopefully. “But you know, we’ve been trying for ages to fix that fence so nobody can get out, and they always find a way. If you wanted to wall ‘em in, you’d have to build a concrete wall.”
“We don’t have the money for that,” Dad said. “Best we can do right now is plug in the gaps in the fence and hope they don’t dig too far down. That won’t solve the problem forever, but it oughtta keep ‘em busy for a while.”
“We’ll take a look at it when we get out there,” I said as my brother Darren staggered sleepily through the front door. “You awake, Darren? Or were you up all night with some big-titted German broad?”
“Shut up!” said Darren, slugging me playfully on the shoulder. I winced; although Darren was the shortest of my brothers, he could throw a punch like no other. “I ain’t slept with anybody in God knows how long.”
“Now boys,” said Mama, walking over to the table carrying delicious-looking plates full of ham and eggs, “that’s no way to talk over breakfast.”
“Mamma, what difference does it make what time of day it is?” Darren asked.
“It’s my house, and them’s the rules,” she said in a firm voice. “You can go outside if you wanna talk like that.”
***
After breakfast, Dad led Jake, Darren, and I out to the back pasture to examine the holes in the fence. The hogs crowded around us as we walked into the pasture; Darren swung at them with his boot, and they scattered in all directions.
Dad stooped down slowly and gestured to a freshly dug hole. “You see what the problem is,” he said. “No matter how low we build the fence, the pigs are just gonna dig deeper. They don’t want to be here, and given enough time, they’ll always find a way out.”
“Looks like they’ve already found several,” I said, turning to survey the pasture. “They’ve got holes dug all up and down this yard. If we plug one, they’re just gonna find themselves another.”
“You oughtta keep ‘em in a pen,” said Darren.
“That was your mother’s suggestion,” Dad said in a grumpy voice. “I don’t like to keep ‘em holed up, not when they’ve got this whole big pasture to roam around in.”
“Dad, you’re a great man but a terrible farmer,” I said. “Every other farmer we know keeps their pigs penned. You won’t do it because you feel bad for the pigs.”
“Honestly, Dad,” said Darren. “Sometimes I wonder if you even know what happens to pigs.”
“I know what’ll happen to ‘em if they keep running loose,” Dad replied, his voice a low growl. “They’ll be eaten by wolves and coyotes and stolen by the neighbors’ boys. It’s no safer for ‘em out there than it is in the pasture. They’re marked for death either way, but it would be nice not to lose our investment. I paid good money for them hogs last Christmas, and I’m not gonna stand here and see it go to waste.”
He looked visibly annoyed. I wondered if Darren’s crack about not knowing how to farm had gotten to him. If Darren was Baloo the Bear, idly drifting through life cutting up and clowning around, Dad was Bagheera: practical, sober, industrious. They had never gotten along and probably never would.
“You’re awful quiet,” said Darren. He turned to face me. “You got any ideas?”
I shook my head. “Short of building a concrete wall, no. We can’t keep the pigs in if they don’t want to stay in. Remember how the dogs used to get out?”
“Yeah, but the dogs would always come back.” Dad lit a cigarette and waved the smoke out of his face. “Them pigs won’t.”
“They’re smart pigs,” said Darren. “I read somewhere that pigs are smarter than dogs.”
“That explains why they keep running away,” I said. “What about Charlotte?” Charlotte was the family border collie.
“She guards the fence as best she can,” said Dad, sitting down on a low fence post. “But there’s only so much she can do. I can’t expect her to stay awake twenty-four hours a day guarding them holes to make sure the hogs don’t get loose. She’s a good dog. She works hard. But like I said, she can only do so much.”