Shine - Lauren Myracle [68]
I laughed back. I hated to say it, but he was growing on me.
IT WAS FOUR O’CLOCK BY THE TIME I GOT HOME. Dinner wouldn’t be for a few hours, so I stopped by our garden and picked the best-looking tomatoes, which I lay gently in the basket I’d rigged to the back of my bike. There were green beans ripe for picking, so I put those in, too. I’d take them to Ridings and see if I could figure out how—or if—he fit into all of this.
As I started down our bumpy driveway, I heard our screen door slam.
“Cat!” Christian called. “You just got here. Where the heck are you going?”
Another voice chimed in. “Is she leaving? Tell her to come back. Tell her we need to talk to her.”
My blood ran cold, and my fool head turned like a puppet’s on a string, even though I knew that voice as well as I knew my own nightmares.
Tommy Lawson, in my house. Tommy Lawson looking for me. Tell her to come back. Tell her we need to talk to her.
“Hey, Cat, hold up,” Tommy called, the devil himself standing beside my brother. He was strong and broad-shouldered and handsome as a movie star, most people would say. “I want to talk to you.”
Yeah, only I had no desire to talk to him. I rode hard and fast toward Ridings’s place, and while the burn in my muscles didn’t banish Tommy from my thoughts, it helped. It made it so I could force Tommy back and think about matters closer to the surface.
Once upon a time, Ridings had a house, just like once upon a time he had a pretty wife and an even prettier baby girl. He worked at the paper mill and brought in enough to live on. They were happy. Then a tornado came and sucked the happiness right out of him, and so much for fairy tales really being true.
When I arrived at his ramshackle roadside stand, I saw just how far he’d fallen. There was a basket of rotten peaches on the fold-out counter, and there were fruit flies buzzing everywhere. Also, Ridings himself was a hot mess, as Destiny would say, and he had BO that nearly knocked me over, even from yards away.
“Well, hey!” he called from the metal folding chair he’d set up alongside the lonely highway. He smiled, showing teeth in desperate need of dental care. “You bring me some veggies? That’s great, that’s great. Bring ’em on over and sit for a spell, why don’cha?”
Normally, I wouldn’t give a second thought to sitting and chatting with Ridings for a bit. But Ridings’s eyes were glassy, and his words were too fast, and there was no one around but the two of us. A car might drive past in the next hour, or it might not.
But I unloaded the beans and tomatoes and leaned tentatively on the wooden stand he’d set up for his vegetables. Remarkably, it didn’t collapse.
“What’s going on, gal?” Ridings said energetically. He scratched his arm, then his other arm, and then the back of his neck. The skin all over his body was raw, with blisters and gashes everywhere. “Durn chiggers. Worst summer I ever seen. Them bugs crawled up under my skin, that’s what I think. Burrowed in and laid their durn eggs.”
“Ridings, can I ask you something?” I said.
“Yeah, ’course. Ask me anything at all.” He scratched his scalp. “You wanna buy some peaches? My little girl, she loved peaches. Juice just dribbled down her chubby cheeks. You ever meet my little girl? You want to see her picture?”
“I’ve seen her picture,” I said. “She’s a cutie, all right.”
He was already digging into the front pocket of his jeans, hiking up one bony hip to get in deep.
“Oh yeah, here we go,” he said. He flipped to the first battered photo, which showed Ridings and his wife and their little girl, Melody. They were sitting stiffly in front of a blue background, all of them wearing crisp white shirts. Ridings wore jeans, his wife a denim miniskirt, and little Melody a teensy baby miniskirt. She had one of those baby headbands for when babies didn’t have hair yet, the kind that went around the baby’s forehead and had a bow on the front.
“It’s a beautiful picture,” I said.