rituals for helping his father to bed when he’d been sick with cancer and he couldn’t ever rest once the sun was down. Milk with a whole tablespoon of orange blossom honey. Sometimes Kyle could go an entire day without thinking of either one of them, gone now for so many years. Him eight and her six. But then there would be weeks at a stretch that he couldn’t get them off his mind. When he’d come back from Iraq they’d been there for him when everything else in his life had come unsprung. The drugs, the barfights, the ugly divorce from a woman he’d met at an off-base bar in Jacksonville, North Carolina. They’d seen him through all that, brought him home where he could remember who he was before he’d given mind, body, and soul to the Marine Corps. Maybe that’s what the Corps demanded, but when he earned his discharge, surely he was entitled to take back his mind even if the rest was supposed to remain.
Kyle took the milk off the stove and drank it in a steel camping cup, listened for a long time to a barred owl that often liked to take up around the back shed when he came to visit. Heard him keep shouting, “Who cooks for you, who cooks for you all?” until he flew off. By then, it was well past time to put head to pillow.
The next morning he was up early and made a big breakfast of biscuit and eggs and JFG coffee. He ate his own plate of food and sat there drinking two cups of the coffee until the sun was up. He had resolved overnight to make the old man feel as welcomed as he could, thought the breakfast could be a running start. Despite their differences, he knew it couldn’t have been easy to be put in the old man’s position. He thought too about what Holston had said about his similarity to Gerald. In many ways it wasn’t that hard to see. Each of them had his own way of coming to the truth of things and sticking by what they believed. It was what kept both of them on the commission. People trusted them to see to the best interests of those they represented. But they also set their teeth deep into their ideas and sometimes when others disagreed it was a hell of a lot easier to bite down harder rather than let go. People had a way of remembering things like that too.
When it had gotten to be time to go to work Gerald still wasn’t up. A hell of a thing. Kyle had long thought the old kept the same hours as roosters. His luck to have to take care of one that slept like a teenager. He scraped the eggs, wrapped the biscuits in foil, and carried out the last of his coffee in the Stanley thermos.
He had worked his way through the upper greenhouse and was cataloguing some things in the lower one when Gerald poked his head in the door.
“You got any weed growing around here?” the old man asked, scratched at his chin whiskers.
“No, Gerald. I don’t grow weed.”
“That’s a shame. I figured it might be the time to pick up a new habit.”
“There’s better habits to pick up, I imagine.”
“Yeah? Maybe so. I hear that meth is all the rage these days. They like to put it in books and movies. Preachers and teachers catching on fire when their drug labs explode. That seems like something I could get into. Seems like something that might be enough to distract a man from his immediate concerns.”
“Think so, huh?”
He showed his hands, shrugged. After a minute of staring around at the plants he stepped down and walked the neighboring aisle, peered down at the specimen tabs.
“You take a sudden interest in a botany lesson or are you out here to help?”
“Hell, I’m not above putting in a hand if you think it could be useful. Reach me that clipboard.”
They worked shoulder to shoulder for the better part of the hour, ran the inventory. Pickens took down the species and numbers they needed in terms of transfer and seed. Kyle had known him to have a strong eye for detail, had seen for years how he measured the worth of some proposal or regulation with a bottomless patience for even the most tedious points. His mind remained anchored to whatever held its attention. He never wavered or became distracted. He was serious about things because he understood that a moment’s inattention was all it took to rob you of the essence of something, to miss the subtlety that distinguished this from that. Too much noise, too many competing motives floated a political life, and a man without the ability to cut through it was no more than the people’s fool.
“What is it you think that man Noon is up to?” Kyle asked once they had run the numbers and stood there looking over the rows of plants.
“What he’s up to?”
“Why he didn’t have the DA press charges. Why he’s letting this settle as easy as he is.”
“Hell, he’s not letting a goddamn thing settle. He needs things to be quiet. Why else would you turn somebody loose you had by the short hairs? He wants to make sure nobody is paying attention. That’s what every fascist that ever came down the pike needed. Invisibility. For a little while, at least.”
“I wouldn’t call putting up a Nazi flag invisibility.”
“That’s nothing. That’s lawn decor. He figured there wouldn’t be any problems about that because of how far back he decided to settle in. Hell, what are the chances he’d run into an enlightened soul like myself way back there in the way back. Bad luck for him is all. Now he’s got to find a way to play the peacenik. He’s meaning to install himself somehow. Him forgiving me. Shit. Only forgiveness I need is from Almighty Cthulhu.”
Kyle had heard him go on these atheistic tears before. Shouting about Baptists being the modern-day equivalent of superstitious Neanderthal clans howling and beating their breasts at the sky wizard whenever their crops failed. Gerald had preferred to locate his faith in H.P. Lovecraft’s horrific mythology of the ancients, he said, because at least those stories were interesting, not mere object lessons in dullness.
Kyle told him he was headed up to wash before he ran down to the vets meeting and asked if he needed him to pick anything up while he was out. He said that he was fine, that he could do well enough with nothing here just as well as he could at his own place, then went just outside the greenhouse to take a leak. Kyle shook his head and went on.
In town Kyle stopped off at a couple of places that kept an order of his plants in their garden shops, took notes for restocking, and chatted with the proprietors. He grocery-shopped at the Food City, picked up a bottle of wine because he knew Gerald fashioned himself as a kind of misunderstood backwoods connoisseur and would appreciate the chance to indulge. Perhaps it would be enough to soften his crankiness, though he doubted it.
When he got to the library he recognized several of the vehicles that were already in the parking lot. Trey Buckner was smoking a cigarette with his car door open talking on the phone with someone. He glanced up and cast a brief wave, mouthed “In five,” while he nodded to whatever was being said into his ear. Trey was one of the earliest members of the veterans group and had been to nearly every meeting for the past six years. He ran a car repair place down around Jonesborough and had a couple of foster kids with his wife. He had been an artilleryman in the Army, which explained why he was always leaning in tight with his head dropped during a conversation, his small hearing aid pointed as close as he could get it to the speaker’s mouth.
Once inside, he saw a couple of the other guys getting coffee from the alcove and taking it back to the community room. He went on to the back office where Laura was.
“Right on time,” she said and smiled. After a quick peek to see that no one could see them, she kissed his cheek and held onto his shoulders for a few beats. Once she let him go, they went back to her desk where they could sit and talk without it seeming out of place to anyone. They’d been seeing each other like this for the past six months, and
