No one came to the porch to see who had come even though he waited a good couple of minutes before he knocked hard enough to rattle the door in its frame.
Turner’s wife Melanie finally answered. She had her boy on her hip. Too big to be carried around like that, Kyle knew.
“Hey, Kyle.”
“Hey yourself.”
She was a good decade younger than Turner, which meant she couldn’t have been much past legal drinking age. Short yellow hair and skin that looked like it had been pulled too tight for too long. The kind of face that might have been called handsome a generation ago but now would most likely be considered hard. A face that held no happy future.
“I think you’ve got something I’ve been missing,” he said.
“Missing, huh?”
“Yeah, that husband of yours. Is he around?”
“Guess that depends on what you mean by around. He’s here, though.”
“You mind if I step inside and talk to him a minute?”
She watched him for a while, said nothing. Her boy stared on with empty eyes.
“Shit,” she said. “What could it hurt?”
She went back to the couch with the boy and let Kyle close the door himself. When his eyes adjusted to the dim light he could see the domestic congestion—the dirty laundry, the chldren’s toys, the erratic scrum of everything else.
“He’s back in the bedroom if you’re sure you want to talk to him.”
Kyle said that he did and went back, stood at the end of the hall listening for anything on the other side of the thin door. He tapped lightly, spoke Turner’s name. When he heard an answer he stepped in.
The room, like the rest of the house, had no electric light. Turner was a vague shape sitting atop the unmade bed, limned by the soft strokes of lingering daylight through the blinds. Kyle’s hand instinctively went to the light switch but the bulb didn’t burn though he flipped it up and down a couple of times.
“Shut off a couple of weeks ago,” Turner told him.
Kyle found a place on a recliner that faced him, wedged in between low piles of sour-smelling clothes.
“She tell you about the job?”
“No,” Kyle said. “She hadn’t told me anything. I just came up here to check on you. The rest of the group, they’ve been missing you.”
“Missing me? I kind of find that hard to believe. Most of them can’t stand the sight of me.”
“That’s not true. You don’t know what other people think of you. No one ever really does.”
If he accepted that point of wisdom, he did so without comment.
“How long you been closed up in here in the dark like this, Turner?”
“Been a while.”
“Couple of days?”
“More than that.”
“A week?”
Turner’s shoulders made some kind of movement that Kyle took to be a shrug.
“You got a weapon in the house?”
“Yeah. I got a couple of deer rifles in the closet.”
“That all?”
He hesitated before he reached a handgun out from beneath the pillow he was sitting against, placed it on a wadded sheet.
“I’m going to come take that from you now, okay?”
“Yeah.”
Kyle took the handgun and slipped it into his waistband at the small of his back, then knocked around in the closet until he’d collected both of the rifles.
“Be careful,” Turner said. “They’re loaded.”
“Nothing else in here I need to be concerned about, is there?”
“No, not now.”
“I’ll be back here in a minute, okay?”
“Yeah.”
Kyle left the bedroom door ajar before he went back to the front of the house. His voice was shaking despite his trying to keep it quiet when he talked to Melanie.
“Don’t you think you could have called somebody?” he said hoarsely.
“With what?” she spat back. “Telephone bills don’t pay themselves. Nothing around here does. There’s not enough gas in the tank to get as far as the highway.”
“You all live right out here with another half a dozen families in walking distance.”
“Yeah, well, it’ll be a cold day in hell before I go to any of them uppity motherfuckers playing white trash.”
“They’re his family, for Christ’s sake.”
Her laugh was even and mean.
“You don’t understand shit, do you?”
“No,” he said, “I guess maybe I don’t.”
HE CALLED and got the deputies out to execute the welfare check and have Turner transported to the hospital psychiatric unit for twenty-four hours observation. After that, they’d just have to play it by ear, but maybe changing up his meds would help. He hoped to God so. He asked Turner if he could come by and check in with him once he got settled. Turner said that that would be fine before the deputies took him out of the hollow in the back of their car.
Melanie cussed at him for a while after her husband had been taken, but when Kyle told her he would give her a ride to somewhere she might be able to stay until things were all right she told him to wait while she packed a few things. She had a sister over in Kingsport she wouldn’t mind seeing.
It was dark by the time he got home. Dark but the house was not empty. As he topped the final rise of the drive he saw Laura’s car parked down by the greenhouse. When he pulled in beside he saw her walk down from the front porch.
“I’d about given up on you,” she told him, encircled his neck with her arms.
“What are you doing here?”
“You want me to leave?”
“I didn’t say that.”
They kissed. The night paused.
“I can’t stay, you know. He expects me back.”
“You got time for a drink?”
“A glass of wine if you’ve
