counter. “Okay,” she said into the dead phone. “Okay.” Outside, Newland had put his face right up to the window, framing it with his free hand, peering in. He was smiling. Carter shoved the phone into her purse.
“That was quick,” Grady said.
Carter picked up a rag and began wiping the counter. “It was Roy. He’s on his way in.”
“I’ll stay ’til he gets here.”
“No.” She’d said that too fast. Grady looked startled, then hurt. She rubbed harder into the counter. “Roy’ll get so pissed when he sees all these coffee stains.”
“No? One minute you want my help, the next minute you don’t.”
“You got stuff to do. I know you do. Plus it’s Saturday. Don’t you have something planned?” Please, she thought. Tell me you’re watching a movie with Gloria Boland or even Jodie Tulane. Some woman who’s safely divorced.
“No plans. But it seems like you don’t want me here.” He glanced out the window.
“It’s not that. I’ll be fine. Promise.”
“Is it Roy? Is he suspicious of me? Because I can talk to him.”
“He’s in kind of a strange place these days.” It wasn’t exactly a lie.
Grady looked closely at her. Then he shrugged. “Okay,” he said, “but remember what I said.”
She watched him walk out and get in his truck, saying something to Newland over his shoulder. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t do any good. It might even make things worse. As soon as Grady drove off, Newland came through the door.
“You want to see Roy?” Carter said. “Roy’s in the back.”
“That’s funny. Didn’t see Roy’s truck.”
“He’s in the back. He drove in with me.”
Newland roamed around the aisles making junior high jokes about Sara Farnsworth. He brought a pack of crackers up to the register. “Don’t hear Roy back there,” he said. “What’s the matter, Carter? Don’t want to be alone with me?”
Carter rang up the sale and held out his change. When he grabbed her hand and pulled it to his crotch, pennies spilled to the counter. She was leaning awkwardly across the counter, her head close to his. With his other hand he pulled off her cap, then he let her go.
He was a child with a treasure, grinning like a schoolyard bully. Carter reached under the counter for her Glock and held it there. “Give it back,” she said.
Newland held her cap in the air, laughing. “Come and get it,” he said. When Carter pulled up the gun she aimed for the space between his arm and the floor, but just at that instant, he lowered his hand. The bullet went through the cap where Col. Bradley had signed it, grazing the tip of Newland Sparks’s thumb.
Roy hunched on a low stool by the fishing supplies, a laptop warming his knees. He counted the flipping jigs and spinnerbaits, and straightened a row of Trilene. Carter had turned on the coffee maker. Its muffled puts and his laptop’s hum gave the air its only life. When his cell rang, Roy hauled himself up and limped outside to where the reception was better. The gout was killing him.
Carter sat cross-legged on the floor, beside the batteries. She was writing over the faded price tags with a black pen, careful not to make it look as though the price had been raised. The screen door slammed as Roy came back in, the “Closed” sign rattling behind him. “He’s not pressing charges,” he said. “I suppose he’ll lord that over us, too. Him and his kin.”
Carter reached for another row of batteries and spread them on the floor. “These flashlight batteries are almost expired.” She made a pile of the oldest ones. “It’s the double A’s people buy now, not so much the C’s and D’s. A lot of things take double A’s. I bet we sell three times as many A’s as all the others.” She set aside two packs of C’s.
Roy stood for a time beside Carter and looked about the store. His grandfather had made most of the shelves from two big oaks that fell in a neighbor’s back field. Roy had climbed on the shelves when he was small; their freshcut smell and sanded edges were a vivid memory. Since he’d taken over the store, he would shop now and then for modern shelving with hooks and nooks and movable parts, only to realize the old shelves were just fine. Probably they could use a good shellacking. It wasn’t going to happen now.
Carter’s hair had fallen about her face as she leaned over her stacks. He could see her scribbles on the clipboard, the numbers he would have to work at deciphering, the nines that resembled fours. She picked up the batteries she’d set aside. “I’m going to put these in the truck,” she said.
“Okay,” he said.
She stood for a moment, studying him. The crease he’d noticed lately between her brows was more pronounced today. Shadows rimmed her eyes. “We could still get by,” she said.
“I don’t know,” he said, shifting onto his right foot, the one that wasn’t hurting. “I just don’t know.”
Carter went out, her shirttail a mess of dust from the floor. She moved toward the Silverado, where the harsh October sun, low in the sky, glinted off the hood that hadn’t been washed in a month. The day she’d sat with him in the dealer’s showroom, jittery about the numbers, flustered over add-ons, they’d agreed right away to order the metallic blue. They thought they would never tire of that, the color of sky. The morning Roy picked up the truck, he’d climbed into the driver’s seat, stuck a CD in the changer and turned the music up high. He flew down the highway on top of the world.
I was born and raised in Kiser, a dinky, third-fiddle town near the Sabine River, a rank and slither-filled water that keeps Texas apart from Louisiana. Kiser had a town square with a courthouse on it, a drugstore, a hardware store, two banks that fought over the town’s six wealthy families, a furniture store owned by one of those families and two empty storefronts that the ladies used for bake sales and quilt shows. In the winter of 2003, when Kiser was still my home, my ex-wife Holly had just opened a yoga studio on Main Street. People in town were either proud or leery of her place, depending on their choice of church, and their reaction was one thing Holly and I could still laugh about. We’d been separated six months and we buried the rancor as often as we could for the sake of our son, whose path in life was hard enough. Frankie was eleven, a gifted child who heard voices from the trees and could multiply seven times eight by the time he was six. Where he got all that is anybody’s guess. He didn’t get it from me.
One Sunday that winter—Groundhog Day to be exact, with no shadow in sight for the critter—I was hiding out in my dreary apartment, avoiding the ruckus that had arrived in Kiser the day before when the shuttle came apart. The town had flown into action—gawking, searching, trying to help—but my altruistic get-up-and-go was tempered by a rawness in my throat and the hangover of a NyQuil slumber. And there was this: I had a big lot of things on my mind. Change had sidled up to me, and more was coming.
With a belly full of orange juice and dubious hope for a clearing head, I reached for the bench chisel next to my chair. A handsome piece of oak lay waiting for me on the floor. In the months since my separation I’d shaped enough heron, deer and
