Better That Way

Chapter 5 - Wes

Here’s a thing I had never told one living person.

Two years back her mother brought a Corolla into Dale’s with the front pads down to metal. I came out to the waiting room to tell them it was done, and Delaney Hollis asked me what had been wrong with it.

Then she stood there for the whole answer, like she actually wanted to know.

That’s it. That’s the whole event. Nobody has ever made anything of it and I wouldn’t know how to explain to one person in Bellamy County why it mattered.

My father left when I was four. It took him eight years to get as far as Ohio and I couldn’t tell you where he was for most of them.

The calls started when he stopped moving. I was twelve. He has never asked me one thing.

Eighteen years off that man, not one question. Four minutes off a girl I had never spoken to in my life, and she wanted to know about brake rotors.

That was all it took to knock me sideways. I’m aware of how that sounds.

Two years of pining after her, and not one person in Bellamy County knew it.

I had a plan for it. A real one — it had her in it, which by her own definition that night made it better than a schedule.

The plan was to keep it right where it was until August took her out of the county and it went quiet on its own. The way those things do.

Anyway. Her hand was now in mine and she was holding on hard.

Out past the cruiser the runway lights were still burning in their two straight lines, running off into the dark toward nothing at all. Up front the radio said something to Machen about a unit out at the interstate.

And I sat in the back of a cop car at one in the morning with the prosecutor’s daughter holding my hand like she meant it, and I thought, with a clarity that should have frightened me:

Eleven weeks. And then I’d still be here.

Machen came around and leaned down into the open door with the citation book. He had a pen clipped to the top of it and a flashlight tucked up under his arm, and he stood there working his jaw like a man with something in his teeth.

“Cutler,” he said. “You want to tell me how a boy who mows this field for the county ended up under the fence at it.”

“I know where the hole is,” I said. “On account of I mow it.”

I said it perfectly straight. I could feel the corner of my mouth trying to go up, but I wouldn’t let it.

He looked at me for a second and I watched him decide not to laugh. He clicked the pen twice and didn’t write anything.

“Miss Hollis.” He took his hat off then, and held it. His voice changed. It got careful in a way that made something go cold and

precise in my chest, because I had heard grown men change their voices for her family before and I knew exactly what it meant.

“You all right? He bring you out here?”

Her hand tightened in mine.

“No sir,” she said. “I brought me out here.”

Machen looked at her a good while. Then he looked at the citation book, and then at the field, and then he wrote.