“Nah.”
“Because of customer loyalty?” she guessed.
“Yep.”
Marianne’s lips pinched together. Carl had never been a man of many words, but this complete nonreaction thing was wearing on her last damn nerve. Normally her nerves were a little more plentiful and resilient, but between the deer and the heat—and the fact that Carl didn’t seem to be at all affected by seeing her again—she was done with this whole afternoon. She threw her hands up in the air. “Really?”
Carl frowned and actually looked at her for the first time since he’d gotten out of his truck. “What?”
“It’s been four years and that’s all you have to say to me? One-syllable answers?”
Carl’s expression soured. “Well, shucks, ma’am,” he drawled in an exaggerated accent. “I didn’t run off to some fancy school and learn ten-dollar words, so ‘one-syllable answers’ is all I got in my back pocket.”
She muttered, “I think I liked ‘hey’ better.”
“Thought you might.” He snorted, turning to her hobbled vehicle. He laid a reverent hand on the bright red paint. “Now, why in the hell would you do this to such a beautiful machine?”
“I was trying to avoid a deer.”
Carl nodded. “That’d do it.”
“Can you fix it?”
“Sure, once I get the parts, which’ll take a while.”
“How long is ‘a while’?”
Carl jerked his shoulders. “A while.”
Marianne attempted to melt Carl’s stupid, beautiful face with the power of her mind. It didn’t work.
“You wanna wait in the truck while I hook this up?” He wagged his head toward the tow truck.
Marianne nodded, crossing to the early-model Ford. The cab of the truck smelled like Carl, leather and engine oil and spearmint gum. It was worn but meticulously clean, like everything else he owned. And it was air-conditioned, which was enough to make Marianne tear up a little in gratitude. She paused at the sight of a plastic Elvis dangling from his rearview mirror, jointed hips swiveling. It had hung in this place of honor in all of Carl’s vehicles, from the moment she’d presented it to him after a family trip to Memphis when she was sixteen. She remembered how touched he’d been that she’d thought of him while she was at Graceland. He’d held on to it all these years, even after she’d left him.
Shaking her head, she glanced down at the console. He probably kept it because he was such an Elvis fanatic, she told herself. He’d probably forgotten she was the one to give it to him. There was a bottle of Coke in the cup holder, beaded with condensation, and as much as she wanted to pour it down her gullet, she knew they were not on spit-sharing terms. Not anymore, at least.
She cranked the AC as high as possible and tilted her head back against the headrest. She closed her eyes, and while it was the last thing she wanted to think about, her mind drifted back to that afternoon on Deer Tick Bay. She’d been just a few days away from leaving for UGA. She had been struggling all summer, trying to figure out a way to make a long-distance relationship with Carl work. She’d heard cautionary tales about hometown boyfriends from older girls at her campus orientation, but she’d been determined to remain Carl’s girlfriend. She didn’t mind missing out on parties or frat boys if it meant keeping Carl’s rough hands and sweet words in her life.
And then that bitch, Sara Lee Cooper, marched into the Snack Shack and informed her that she’d seen Carl looking at engagement rings at a pawnshop in Dahlonega. Marianne had promptly run out of the shack and thrown up off the dock, which meant she didn’t have to do much reflecting on her choice. She couldn’t marry Carl. Not then, not in a few years; she wasn’t ready. She couldn’t give up college. The idea of being stuck in Lake Sackett, having kids and stretching Carl’s salary as an apprentice mechanic with double coupons and home canning? She wanted to throw up all over again.
So, the next day, she’d met him at their spot on Deer Tick Bay, knowing that she had to break things off with him, feeling like the most selfish person in the world. He’d been stripping when she anchored her little johnboat near his kayak. It wasn’t presumptuous. They’d been having regular, doubly safe sex on the banks of this inlet for the better part of the year. He’d been down to his skivvies and had his socks in his hands when she climbed out of the boat and told him, “I can’t.”
Carl pulled that little half smile that he saved for her. “Not up for it? That’s all right. Wanna do some fishin’ instead?”
Marianne felt the mud of the shoreline soaking through her tennis shoes. That smile. That smile was going to be burned into her brain for years to come. Carl didn’t open up to people. It had taken her years to get him to trust her enough to tell her anything real about himself, much less believe that she wanted to be with him. And she was about to wipe that smile off his face for completely selfish reasons.
She was going to hell in a handcart.
Marianne took a deep breath and worked to keep her expression neutral. “No, I mean, I can’t leave for school still datin’ you. I can’t keep seein’ you, Carl. We need to end things.”
The smile died a slow death, leaching from his face. Marianne felt a distinct snap inside her chest that she was pretty sure was her heart breaking, and then felt that much guiltier for thinking about her own pain when she was the one hurting Carl.
“I thought you didn’t want to break up just because you were leavin’ for school,” Carl bit out, surprisingly authoritative for a guy standing in waist-high grass in his tighty-whities. “When you got in, I said maybe we should break up, and you said no, that you wanted to be with me, and now you don’t? What happened? Did I do somethin’? Did your daddy say somethin’? What the hell is going on?”
“I just realized, I don’t want to miss out on everything college has to offer. You know, meetin’ new people and havin’ fun,” she said, trying so hard to keep her tone light that it made her throat ache. “How am I supposed to go out with friends if I’m stuck in my dorm room, waitin’ for you to call? If I’m worryin’ every second about whether it would hurt your feelin’s that I’m at a party or talkin’ to some other guy? I just think we have our whole lives ahead of us, Carl, and it was silly of me to try to cling to you like some sort of security blankie. It was wrong. And I’m sorry.”
“Oh, you’re sorry, all right. You’re just some sorry, stuck-up little princess who got bored a’ slummin’ it, and now you’re trying to paint it up all fancy. You got what you wanted from me and now you’re done. That’s just fine with me.”
“Don’t do that,” Marianne shot back. “Don’t pull the ‘spoiled rich girl card’ with me. I told you that I’ve never cared about your family or where you come from, and nobody from my family cares about that, either.”
“Your daddy sure the hell does!”
“My daddy hasn’t liked anyone I’ve ever dated. I could be dating a real-life prince and he would say His Highness wasn’t good enough for me. It’s like the Southern father’s code. Look, Carl, this is what’s supposed to happen with high school sweethearts. People don’t marry their first loves and live happily ever after. This doesn’t have to be ugly.”
“You made it ugly. You acted like you cared. You made me believe . . . aw, hell, what does it matter? You wanna go off and be some co-ed bimbo, fine. Go. I’m not gonna stop you.”
“That’s not fair.”
“No, what’s not fair is you callin’ me your ‘first love’ when you don’t give a damn about me. Just go.”
“Carl.” She sighed.
“GO!” he roared.
Marianne was back on her own boat in two strides. She started the outboard by muscle memory alone, because she for damn sure couldn’t see through the tears in her eyes. She’d wept through packing, telling her parents that it was just presemester nerves, which she also blamed when she cried through moving into her dorm at UGA.
Carl didn’t contact her once, and she thought maybe that hurt more than anything. She stuck it out at UGA, though, because she wasn’t about to waste the heartache she was suffering. She made friends with the girls in her dorm. She threw herself into classes and campus activities. She barely dated. She tried more than a few times, but she just never clicked with anyone.
They were too polished and practiced; too sweet and not enough—
Carl opened the door to the tow truck, jarring Marianne back into the present. She avoided yelping like a scalded cat, but it was a near thing.
“We’ll have to drive slow back to town, or else we’ll do more damage to your suspension.”
“Oh,” she said, pursing her lips. “Great.”
2
CARL PUT THE truck into gear and slowly turned the rig toward town. He kept his eyes on the road, not speaking. His hands were still rough and still about three shades darker than the rest of him. And he appeared to be white-knuckling the wheel. The only time he let go was to direct the air vents to blow on her.
Marianne cleared her throat and stared out the window, watching the hills of Sackett County roll by. “So . . .”
That was all she had. One tiny syllable filling up the Grand Canyon of awkwardness between them. Pathetic. The problem was an opening line. What exactly was she supposed to say here? Was there a safe subject to land on when your last memory of someone was leaving him standing with his socks in his hands and his heart in the dirt? It felt condescending to ask how he was “really” doing. He couldn’t truly be fine, right? He had to be holding on to some anger at her, given the way she’d left things. And while the “aw, shucks, ma’am” routine had been a little testy, it didn’t fit the level of bitterness she’d expected—somewhere around the level of Aunt Leslie’s nasty-ass coffee.
It was part of the reason she’d kept visits home so brief over the last few years; taking every summer work program and internship she could find so she could avoid running into him in town. She knew she deserved his resentment and she didn’t want to give him the chance to vent it all over her. But what if he wasn’t affected at all? Somehow that would be so much worse, knowing that she’d been alone in her heartbreak while he drank her away with some skank down at Dwight Newcome’s party pier.
No. This was fine. Polite and distant was the way to go. She didn’t need some big dramatic scene to give her closure or heal her inner self. She was a McCready, dammit. Her family practically invented getting through unpleasant situations with a smile and a spontaneously baked Bundt cake. She could get through this summer with a little grace and then bolt to Columbia with most of her pride intact. Maybe she could have someone else fix her car so she didn’t have to see him again. There had to be another garage somewhere close . . . that she hadn’t heard about in her eighteen years of living in Lake Sackett . . .
Carl pressed PLAY on the car stereo. The CD player, about thirty years after-market compared to the rest of the truck, began playing “Don’t Leave Me Now.” Frowning, Carl reached forward and hit the SKIP button. The opening bars of “Don’t Be Cruel” blared out of the speakers. Carl cleared his throat and hit the SKIP button again, landing on “Don’t.”
Was this some sort of hellish mix CD of all the plaintive Elvis songs that started with don’t?
“I don’t need music,” she said.
“Okay,” Carl immediately agreed and switched off the stereo. “So, your brother said you got into another college? How much college does one person need?”
She thought maybe Carl didn’t mean to sound both resentful and snarky—no, scratch that, that was probably exactly how he meant to sound. She cleared her throat. “Uh, yeah, I got into law school. And if that one person wants to be a lawyer, a couple more years.”
“You’re gonna be a lawyer?”
“That’s the plan,” she said. “When did you buy the garage?”
“Few years ago. Wendall moved down to Florida to be with his grandkids. Sold it cheap.”
Marianne suppressed a smile. Wendall Mason had always had a soft spot for Carl. The Dawsons were one of the more “colorful” families in Lake Sackett. J. R. Dawson hadn’t been seen since Mrs. Dawson gave birth to Carl’s little sister, Cheyenne. He’d claimed his virile manliness couldn’t have possibly produced a girl, so Mrs. Dawson must have cheated. Carl’s older brother, Ricky, had been arrested for everything from selling oregano packaged as marijuana to high school kids to posing as a clergyman to get free admission to a Braves game. When Cheyenne was seventeen, she ran away with a Tilt-A-Whirl operator from a traveling carnival.
While it was easy to laugh away their wacky dysfunction, the Dawsons were poor at a level only seen in Faulkner stories. As in, they were always first on the Baptist church’s Christmas basket list. As in, they’d eaten animals Ricky hit with his truck. As in, Carl had one pair of jeans per school year and his mama told him to “try not to grow.” Carl once confided in Marianne that he hadn’t known what having a full stomach felt like until Duffy had invited him over for dinner.
While Junior had held back from the boy, Carl had pretty much been adopted by the other McCreadys. Marianne watched him go from a skittish, suspicious kid to someone who hugged voluntarily and easily. The McCreadys fed him, invited him over for holidays, tutored him through his apprenticeship tests. No one in Carl’s own family had encouraged him to graduate from high school. Hell, no one had encouraged him to have a job. They just wanted him out of the house as quick as possible.
At least she hadn’t ruined that when she left. She knew that Carl had continued to attend those barbecues and family parties and weekend fishing trips after she moved away. At first she’d felt a small sense of betrayal, like her family had taken his side in the breakup. But they never tried to force her back into contact with him—with the obvious exception of Duffy’s current shenanigans. They didn’t subtly drop him into conversation . . . after she’d asked them not to . . . for the third time. Carl needed the McCreadys more than she did, and it wasn’t like she was in Lake Sackett to spend time with them anyway. And his hanging around gave her the excuse she needed not to come home. Win-win.
And the truck had been silent for at least three minutes.
She cleared her throat again. “So where are you livin’ these days?”
“Well, Wendall threw his house into the deal when I bought the garage. He didn’t want some rich outsider buyin’ it and turnin’ it into a weekend place.”
“That big old house on Peachtree?” she exclaimed.
Wendall’s mother, Verna Chapman, had been the youngest and much adored daughter of the former mayor of Lake Sackett. He’d been dismayed when his baby girl married a grease monkey by the name of Wally Mason—quite happily by all accounts, even if she had been cut off from daddy’s money. Mayor Chapman’s biblical disownment was pointless since Wendall’s maiden aunts ended up leaving him the sprawling clay-brick antebellum home before he married. Marianne remembered it as a crumbling showplace when she was a kid, all molting paint and sagging eaves, the sort of house that popped up on Scooby-Doo.
Carl nodded. “It’s not in great shape. Duffy’s helping me fix it up on weekends when he has time. The two of us spend more time pickin’ splinters out of our hind ends than anything else.”
“Duffy’s never exactly been handy,” Marianne said with a snort.
“Jackass damn near took off his own head with a belt sander.”
“That sounds about right.” Marianne nodded. “It’s nice, though, that the two of you stayed friends. I hardly keep in touch with anyone from high school.”
“Mm-hmm.” Carl managed to fit more judginess in two noncommittal syllables than Tootie’s entire quilting guild could fit in an afternoon. But she didn’t have time to call him on it because they were pulling into the bumpy gravel drive of the McCready compound. She hadn’t realized she was holding her breath until she exhaled at the
sight of her grandparents’ large old cabin with its concrete fish and crowded flower boxes.
McCreadys had lived in Sackett County since before the river was dammed to create the lake. Marianne’s family was rooted in a pair of brothers, John and Earl Jr., born to farmers who were—honestly—never that good at farming. When Earl Jr. came home from World War I, missing several toes and half an ass cheek, he built a bait shack on the shore of the lake, selling worms and homemade lemonade and sandwiches that his wife, Kate, made. John had always been more interested in carpentry than fishing, and started making very sturdy cabinets for a living. The Spanish flu epidemic hit Lake Sackett in 1918, taking out a good portion of the population, and John had to turn his cabinet-making skills to making coffins.
With so many people ordering caskets, John needed more space to work, and Earl let him use the back of his bait shack as a workshop. The two couples had always gotten along well. The bait shop grew, because people loved Kate’s cooking and Earl’s fishing advice. And the coffin business took off, because death is a recession-proof industry. The following generations added to the business over time, offering full funeral services, guided fishing tours, snacks, and tackle.
And now several generations of their descendants lived on the shore of Lake Sackett, where the original McCready homestead stood, in a series of cabins centered around Marianne’s grandparents’ place. It was a little strange sometimes, having her whole extended family live within shouting distance. But for the most part, it worked. You knocked before barging into someone’s house. You kept all but the most pointed opinions to yourself. Everybody understood that you didn’t leave your front door open, because Aunt Tootie’s dogs would run in; that you didn’t go into Uncle Stan’s abandoned cabin because it was haunted by the ghosts of his broken marriage; and that you never, ever, ate Donna’s peach cobbler, because it was sadness in Pyrex form.
Marianne had almost relaxed into the idea of being glad to be home, imagining that she could even smell the scent of roasting meat wafting through the truck’s vents. But then she saw the banner stretched from her grandparents’ cabin to her parents’, reading WELCOME HOME, MARIANNE in enormous red glitter letters.