Shine

  “Oh,” I said. I hopped up and hurried down the hall. On the way to her room, I passed another room crammed floor to ceiling with plastic bins, cardboard boxes, and wire hangers.

  “So that’s why she’s bound and determined to stay in Black Creek,” she said, picking up where we’d left off. “Never mind that even here in Black Creek, she thinks everyone’s out to get her. Did I mention that part?”

  I was distracted, because unlike the rest of the house, her room was spotless. On top of her chest of drawers was a set of nesting dolls, separated from one another and lined up in order of height. Other than that, there was no clutter.

  “I’m sorry?” I said.

  “For what?” she said.

  “No, I mean . . .” I pushed a stray hair behind my ear. “Why does she think everyone is out to get her? Mrs. Lawson?”

  Destiny studied me. She made a hmmph sound and turned back to her closet. “Supposedly, checks have gone missing from her mailbox, and she saw a Dateline report about how criminals can do all sorts of stuff with bank account numbers.” The way she said “criminals” made it clear she was mocking Mrs. Lawson’s concerns. “Whatever, right?”

  “Tommy bought a new mailbox for her,” I said. I sat cautiously on the end of Destiny’s bed, which was twin-size and pink. I didn’t want to mess up the covers. “One she can lock.”

  Destiny straightened up. A pair of black heels dangled from her index finger. “Well, that was nice of him, I guess. Tommy’s not all bad.” She lifted the shoes. “Yes or no?”

  I didn’t know. I didn’t know about shoes or outfits or makeup, and my stomach clenched up. “Yes?” I ventured.

  She looked at the shoes, held out one bare foot, and nodded. “Yeah.”

  As she slipped a shoe on, hopping to keep from falling, I said, “Do you think anyone really stole from her?”

  She slipped the strap of the second shoe over her heel and straightened up. “It happens. Freakin’ tweakers, coming out like zombies in the night.”

  Tweakers, meaning anyone dumb enough to do meth. They were zombielike with their gray teeth and pocked skin, if they let it get that far.

  “You thinks meth heads have been stealing her checks?” I said.

  “Oh, who knows,” Destiny said, less a question than a worn out dismissal. “But it happens, sure. They wash the checks with bleach and then write in their own name on the PAY TO line. Voilà, instant money.”

  It sounded like she knew a lot about it. As she checked her lipstick in the mirror, my eyes strayed back to the nesting dolls. I wondered who gave them to her. How long she’d had them.

  I toyed with a question as she applied a new layer of gloss over her already bright lips. Finally, I went ahead and asked.

  “So . . . why did you and Tommy break up?”

  She smacked her lips, checked her teeth, and drew back from the mirror. “I’m s’posed to be at Sheldon’s,” she said, exiting her room.

  “Just tell me quick,” I said, trailing after her. She was a girl once, too. The dolls said as much. If Tommy had hit her or something, I’d have proof that he liked to hurt people in general, and not just me.

  Then I realized where my mind had gone—that I was hoping Destiny had gotten beat on—and I’d have done about anything to take the question back.

  Destiny didn’t seem traumatized, however. Just put-out. “You know Willow?”

  “Yeah,” I said. Willow got pregnant and had a baby when she was sixteen, same age as I was now. She lived with her boyfriend, and they both liked chasing the dragon, meaning they liked to burn their meth and sniff the wispy white fumes. That’s what people said.

  “Willow and me used to be friends,” Destiny said. She passed through the living room and swooped up her purse from the sofa. She continued on to the front door, but didn’t open it. “Then Willow got with Darren, and she had her baby, and you know how that goes.”

  I didn’t, but I could imagine.

  “I didn’t want to just abandon her, so I went to see her one day. To see the baby.”

  “That’s good. I bet she was real glad.”

  “No, she was real high,” Destiny said bitterly. “Dumb girl didn’t have no job, and neither did Darren. But I showed up at Darren’s apartment, and what do you know? They’ve got a wide-screen TV and a massage chair, not to mention all kinds of crap for the baby. I was, ‘Dang. Where’d y’all get this stuff?’”

  “Were they the ones washing checks?”

  “God, no,” she said, like I’d insulted her. “Washing checks takes a steady hand.”

  “So where’d the stuff come from? Where’d they get money for it?”

  “From Darren. Darren’s a runner, but he steps on it sometimes.”

  “Steps on it?” I shook my head. “I don’t know what that means.”

  “It means he mixed the shit with talcum powder, but sold it as pure and kept the profits.”

  “Oh.”

  “So one day I went over to get a bump, right?”

  “I thought you went to see the baby.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” She looked at me hard. “And just so you know, this was before I got my head straight. I don’t do that crap no more.”

  “Um, okay.”

  “Well, Tommy got there before I did,” she said with a sigh. “I was gonna meet him at Darren’s, and we were gonna see the baby, and maybe we’d stay for a while. But by the time I arrived, they’d started without me, and every one of ‘em was higher than a Carolina pine. End of story.”

  “What do you mean, ‘end of story’? How is that the end of the story?”

  She twisted her mouth. She didn’t look happy, but her blond hair was shiny, and she didn’t have any burns on her face or picked-at scabs on the insides of her arms. She didn’t look like a user.

  “They thought it’d be funny to pull a gun on me,” she said. “They were amped out of their frickin’ minds, and Darren, he pointed his pistol at me and said, ‘Hands up, bitch. We’re gonna have to do a strip search.’”

  “What jerks,” I said.

  “‘Jerks,’” she said. “That’s one way of putting it.”

  “Does Tommy use meth?” I asked. Tommy was a lot of things, most of them bad. But a tweaker?

  Her eyebrows formed upside-down V’s. “Um . . . yeah.”

  Incredibly, a wave of sadness washed over me. I felt like such an innocent.

  “So that’s what split y’all apart,” I stated.

  “And that’s why I won’t let him come over or nothing, even though he says he’s clean now.” She opened the front door. “Called me up and said he didn’t want to date me no more, but he did want to apologize for how bad he treated me. Said he’d gone clean for Jesus.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Tommy.”

  “Tell me about it. Plus I know how easy it is to fall back into that crap.” Her features shifted. I couldn’t say how, exactly, but the overall effect was to make my heart hurt for her. “And the way he acted when he was high—he did some crazy stuff. Out-of-his-mind kind of crazy. Afterward he’d feel real bad, and he’d go on about how sorry he was, but . . .”

  I waited.

  She snapped out of it and stepped through the open door. “So, yeah. That’s why we broke up.”

  I stayed where I was.

  “Why’d Darren have a pistol?” I asked. Every boy I knew had a rifle or a shotgun, and usually both. Christian got his first rifle when he was six. He killed his first deer a month later and got his picture in the paper, squatting by the carcass and smiling wide.

  But handguns were a different story. Handguns weren’t for shooting game; they were for shooting people. Plus, unless the rules had changed, you couldn’t own one if you were under twenty-one.

  “Comes with the job,” Destiny said.

  “Huh?”

  She sighed. “Okay, I’m not trying to be mean, but how clueless are you?”

  “Pretty clueless,” I admitted.

  “Well, it’s not hard. You want
a gun, you’re gonna get yourself a gun. Steal it, buy it from a friend, trade some crank for it. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, still trying to piece it together.

  “You know Wally? Scumbag who cooks up the meth?”

  I nodded, happy to supply the right answer for once.

  “He gives all his boys handguns. That’s how Darren got his, and I’d guess the same’s true for Tommy and Beef and Dupree.”

  I tried not to show my shock, but I couldn’t help it. “Beef?” I exclaimed. “And Dupree?”

  “You didn’t know they’re Wally’s boys?” Destiny asked.

  I gazed past her. Sunlight glinted on the hood of her pickup.

  “You honestly didn’t know,” she repeated.

  “Is Beef a user?” I said, unable to keep my voice from wavering. Tommy using meth was bad. Anybody using meth was bad, and that went for Destiny, too. But Beef? And if Beef was messed up with that stuff—hopefully he wasn’t, but just if—what if my brother was, too?

  No. Never.

  I’d heard a saying about meth, that it took you down one of three roads: jail, the psych ward, or death. No matter how smart or careful or under control you thought you were, if you used meth, you’d end up at one of those destinations.

  I knew Beef was in a hard place, what with losing his wrestling scholarship and dropping out of school. But how could he possibly think to himself, Well, I’ll just start slamming meth. That’ll put me back on the road to glory.

  “If it makes you feel better, Patrick wanted him out,” Destiny said. “I don’t know much, but I do know that.”

  “Wanted him to stop using, or to stop working for Wally?”

  “Both?” she said.

  I pressed my hands over my face.

  “Hey,” she said. “It can be done. Quitting, I mean. Look at me, I’m living proof.”

  Yeah, only she was heading out the door in a miniskirt and heels. Her lips were bright red, and I was pretty sure she wasn’t heading to Sheldon’s to play Scrabble.

  “But you still party,” I said.

  “Of course, just no more hard stuff. I can’t luxuriate away my youth, see.” She hesitated. “Nobody knows this, but I’m gonna own my own beauty salon one day.”

  I tried for a smile. “That’s cool. You’d be good at that.”

  “I want to learn how to do them Brazilian perms,” she said. “You heard of them? They make your hair super straight without even drying it out.”

  She took a strand of my hair and ran her thumb and forefinger down the length of it. Her touch was steady. “You wouldn’t need one, but for people with that super frizzy hair, it could be life changing.”

  “Destiny . . .”

  “Some people do change, Cat. Not many, but it can be done.” She prodded me out the door. “I gotta go. If you ever want your hair cut, let me know.”

  THIS MORNING, I WENT WITH AUNT TILDY TO SEE Missus Marietta, one of the church shut-ins. She was too elderly to get around on her own, and she had hardly any visitors. It was as if the world had forgotten her. It was good of Aunt Tildy to check on her every month, but that was Aunt Tildy, who tried to live a godly life. She maybe didn’t get it right all the time, but who did?

  A snapshot of Aunt Tildy:

  Long brown hair streaked with gray, because she thought it was vain for a woman to color her hair. I remembered watching her peer at her reflection and tut, saying, “Lord, I’m not ready to look like my mama. I’m too young to look like my mama.” I suspected that if Aunt Tildy did get the gray covered, she’d be as happy as a kid blowing out birthday candles. But she would never. She had rules, and she was big on following them.

  The next thing that came to mind was chores, chores, and more chores. Aunt Tildy just loved work, and she loved putting me to work. Christian didn’t have to do as much, because he was a boy. She did insist he make up his bed every day, though, and she made him clean whatever deer, squirrel, and rabbit he shot and brought home. “You kill it; you clean it,” she told him.

  Next on the list? Country music. Aunt Tildy had a radio in the kitchen that she listened to all day. She didn’t sing along, because that would be “letting loose,” and she didn’t do that. She didn’t hug me much, either. I figured being prim and proper made her feel safe.

  No, that wasn’t quite it. It was more like . . . like life was messy, with snotty noses and first periods and girls crying over the things girls cry about. Aunt Tildy didn’t like messes, and she would prefer to be prim and proper always, but if she absolutely had to step in the muck—if there was no one else to do it, and it had to be done—then she would.

  Thinking about that side of Aunt Tildy dredged up other memories. Memories of Tommy. My personal monster-under-the-bed, only it lurked in my heart instead, snapping its sharp teeth when I least expected it.

  The few times I tried to talk about it with Aunt Tildy, she just frowned and scrubbed harder on the pot she was scouring. And yes, it hurt, having her pretend it never happened. Aunt Tildy worked for Tommy’s daddy, and she wasn’t going to stir up trouble.

  Anyway, nursing my wounded feelings was neither here nor there. What mattered were facts, not feelings, and the facts added up to a single, hard truth. Three years ago, Christian saw what Tommy was doing to me in our living room and did nothing. Aunt Tildy, on the other hand, made Tommy stop, and for that I would always be fiercely grateful.

  That brought me to the last detail in my aunt Tildy collage. She was my strongest link to my mother. I was two when Mama died, so my memories of her were dandelion wisps fluttering out of reach. Warmth. Safety. A feeling of home.

  Aunt Tildy was Mama’s older sister, and while she wasn’t my mother, she was better than nothing.

  Anyway. Missus Marietta loved the rhubarb crumble we brought her. Aunt Tildy was sweet and told Missus Marietta I made it, when really I just did the crumble part. I like lots of brown sugar, so I added twice the normal amount. It looked so pretty when I pulled it out of the oven, the crumbly topping all golden and buttery and chunks of rhubarb popping out here and there, oozing their ruby red juice.

  We visited with Missus Marietta for an hour, and I brushed her long silver hair the way she liked. She asked about Patrick, though she called him “that boy, you know the one,” and said it was a crying shame what happened to him.

  “There’s folks in Black Creek who ain’t just mean, they were born mean,” she said in her quavery voice. Aunt Tildy started to reproach her, but Missus Marietta would have none of it. “Now, Tilda, I been living in these parts for near on ninety years. I know what I know.”

  “But there are also people who are nice,” I ventured, surprised to hear myself saying it.

  “Yes, there are,” Missus Marietta conceded. She gave me her toothless smile. “And all three of us are right here in this room.”

  On the drive back, Aunt Tildy and I were silent. Just before we reached our house, her hand slid from the wheel, hovered over my leg, and patted me: two quick pats, and then right back to the steering wheel.

  “You’re doing real good,” she said, keeping her eyes on the road.

  “I am?” I said.

  “At . . . at finally . . .” She frowned. “At growing into a fine young lady.” She cut her eyes at me, and if you didn’t know her, you’d think she was being sharp. But that was just her way. “I’m real glad you’re getting out again.”

  I felt exposed. But warm, too. “Um, thanks.”

  Back home, I took a plate of rhubarb crumble out to Daddy, rationalizing that yes, it was dessert, which he wasn’t supposed to have because of his heart and being so fat. But at least it involved fruit. It had to be better than fried pork skins and Wally’s moonshine.

  Then I biked to Huskers, the sandwich shop where Beef worked. Dupree worked there, too. I had yet to find out what happened the night Patrick was attacked, during the before-time when Patrick was hanging with the redneck posse. I wanted Beef to fill me in.

  Maybe too, I wanted to see if what
Destiny said was true.

  I parked my bike on the dying grass between the sidewalk and the sandwich shop. The glass door was smudged, and when I pushed it open, the little bell on the top didn’t jingle like it used to. It made one sad ding, that’s all.

  At the narrow counter, I ordered a cherry Coke and paid for it with money earned from our family garden. Every so often I loaded up a wagon with cucumbers and kale and whatever looked good and hauled it to Ridings McAllister, who ran a roadside produce stand. Other folks brought their fruit and vegetables to Ridings as well, and when the mood struck him, he doled out everyone’s share of the meager profits.

  After ringing me up, Beef reached across the counter and tousled my hair. “Wassup, girl? Looked for you at church on Sunday, but didn’t find you.”

  “Yeah, ’cause you didn’t come in the dang building,” I scolded him. “You stayed outside where the cars were.”

  He laughed.

  “Come talk to me while I drink my Coke,” I said.

  “Best offer I’ve had all day,” he said.

  Dupree was slapping wax paper between slices of lunch meat, and Beef whistled to get his attention. “Holler if things get busy, all right, homes?”

  “Sure thing, hoss,” Dupree said, bobbing his head to whatever tune was running through his brain. Dupree was a stoner, and he was always bobbing his head. Anyway, Huskers was empty except for me, so Beef’s services weren’t exactly needed.

  Beef sat across from me, and we did a brief hey-how-are-ya catch-up. It did my heart good to see him. I told him he had a stain on his T-shirt, and when he ducked his head to check, I reached over and flicked him, just like he used to do to me. We both grinned.

  “You better watch it, girl,” he said. “You know I always get you back.”

  “Ooo, I’m so scared,” I said.

  He slung both arms over the back of his chair, and it reminded me how different girls and guys were. Girls kept their bodies tucked in tight, while boys took up every inch of room they could. Beef especially tried to take up room, because he was on the skinny side. He had muscles, but they were ropy farm boy muscles, and when his jeans hung low, it wasn’t for fashion.